Bright Lights Film Journal

We are interested in short pieces (reviews of single movies, DVDs, books) and more substantial studies of directors and other key production figures (cinematographers and producers, for example), analyses of genres, studios and studio style, and topics like gender and minority contributions to film. We always need overviews of international and minority cinemas, in-depth director interviews, discussions of the impact of multimedia on film, breakthrough technologies, animation, and studies of neglected or misinterpreted figures in film history. We have no set taboos and prefer passionate, opinionated, even ranting pieces that are intelligently and engagingly written. Political, anti-capitalist, pro-sex tirades always welcome. Typically, we have no particular theme, preferring a potpourri made up of what your editor, our regular writers, and other contributors are thinking and writing about.

Much of our material comes from students and professors, but enthusiastic, educated, smartly written fan pieces are always welcome. Bright Lights is not an academic ghetto, and looks more for idiosyncratic style, and the ability to make ideas available to the widest possible audience, than bone-dry scholarly analysis. We are most interested in bringing ideas to a readership hungry for information but put off by standard, navel-gazing academic writing. If your submission is creaking under the weight of Lacanish, psychoanalytic, and other specialist hermetic jargon (e.g., words like “semiotic” and “transumption”), please reconsider submitting. We greatly value wit and look for literary value in submissions.