Dylan Fugel, Author at Bright Wall/Dark Room

Community, in Les Blank’s affectionate filmography, is often the giving of your time and spirit to something that expects nothing in return other than that you enjoy it. In 1984's In Heaven There Is No Beer?, he demonstrates how even polka can be ecstatic, can be uplifting, can take you all the way to heaven if you let it into your heart.

After Laughter, Comes Tears

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 133: Heartbreakers

Some of country music’s best songs suggest that the singers are laughing through the pain, using humor as a salve for emotional wounds. That interplay between laughter and heartbreak, a weary chuckle preceding a bitter sob, is the connective tissue that binds Robert Altman's Nashville and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.

Bodies of Work: The Ballet and Bone of Beau Travail

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 129: 1999

“How does she do it?” you ask when watching Beau Travail. How is Claire Denis capable of infusing the human body with such depths of meaning, how does she render it so volatile?

News From Home: Ode To The Death And Life Of One Great American City

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

News from Home reminds us that film, as an art form, is only capable of reconstructing, re-making paths that have already been trod, of showing scars but not soothing the wound, of hearing from home but being unable to change the fact that it took you a long time to come back.

Blank Faces: Les Blank’s Community Portraits

After Laughter, Comes Tears

Bodies of Work: The Ballet and Bone of Beau Travail

News From Home: Ode To The Death And Life Of One Great American City