Issue 140: Community Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Community isn’t just for comfort in Miyazaki’s world—it serves an important function as a hallmark of interdependence, a vital theme in most of his films. Miyazaki is deeply concerned with how humans, animals, spirits, and the natural world can live in balance with one another, or at least strive to.

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness

Kindness as Compliance

Hannah Kim·

Issue 140: Community

In both Kinds of Kindness and Women Talking, a certain kind of kindness and a certain kind of despair start to sound like the same tune.

No Wild and Aberrant Star

Riley Womack·

Issue 140: Community

The driving force of John Sayles' Lone Star isn’t the suspense of discovery, but the moral weight of what’s already known—and what people choose to do with it.

So You Know What It’s Like

Adam Membrey·

Issue 140: Community

Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12 provides validation for the frequently invalidated and offers a stunning portrayal of a perpetual liminal space, where time together—for patients and staff alike—is fleeting. Where you can only do so much, but can also be exactly what someone else needs in the moment they most need it.

You Can/Not Dis/Connect

Griff Maloney·

Issue 140: Community

What I see in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days is a man who is healing himself through intentionality, who allows himself to be in the world and one with it.

Laughing With the Pain

Natalie Marlin·

Issue 140: Community

There’s a lot of earnest love buried underneath every moment of Jackass, beneath the onslaught of dicks and shit that most immediately take up the frame.

Marcel the Shell’s Search For Community

Ross McIndoe·

Issue 140: Community

Through the loss of his original community, his entrance into a new digital one, and his burgeoning relationship with the director, Marcel is given a lot to think about when it comes to what the word "community” really means. And since he’s never shy about sharing his thoughts, he leaves us with a lot to think about, too.

Blank Faces: Les Blank’s Community Portraits

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 140: Community

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.

Community as a Curse: The Pulp Trilogy Of Marleen Gorris

Bryan Miller·

Issue 140: Community

Taken together, the first three films from pioneering feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris—A Question Of Silence, Broken Mirrors, and The Last Island—form a scathing indictment of not just any particular society but the very idea of society, observed with the chilly detachment of someone who’s surprised that you’re surprised.

Fighting Back in Dark Waters

Jeffrey Webb·

Issue 140: Community

Todd Haynes' Dark Waters shows a community fighting back and achieving justice for themselves while also proving wrong a century’s worth of stereotypes and jokes.

Can I Help You, Brother?

Russell Nichols·

Issue 140: Community

An early draft of The Brother from Another Planet was titled The Brother Who Fell to Earth. But for a film released in 1984, starring Joe Morton as a three-toed runaway extraterrestrial slave who can’t speak, a riff on the David Bowie vehicle wouldn’t do it justice. This parable needed a name of its own.

Double Features: Food and Community in Babette’s Feast and First Cow

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Double Features Issue 140: Community

Babette’s Feast (1987) and First Cow (2019) anchor themselves in locations dotted with small cooking fires, smoke rising in the cold. Both movies dream of human life as more than simple subsistence; both present simple stories in which the act of preparing a good meal threatens to tear a community apart.