Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director It’s one of the great gags in film theory. Writing in 1969, Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni devise a seven-part critical...
Lewis, Jerry Chris Fujiwara July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director, Great Directors March 16, 1926, Newark, New Jersey, USA August 20, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA To note that the films of Jerry Lewis are a rich, pleasurable and en...
Some Basic Characteristics of the Fool (1970) The Melbourne Film Bulletin July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “O dear god please give me the serenity to understand the things I can not change; to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” The...
Mr Lewis, “The Idiot-Kid” and Me Jennifer Sabine July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “At the same time, there is a contradiction because you don’t really think in terms of directing yourself. You refer and must refer to that ‘other bei...
The Bellboy (1960) James L. Neibaur July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director In 1946, when the hot new comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis burst onto the New York nightclub scene, their outrageous irreverence was just th...
The Ladies Man (1961) Murray Pomerance July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Bad Fit: The Ladies Man (1961) Players and painted stage too all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. William Butler Yeats, “The...
The Errand Boy (1961) Marco Grosoli July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director On what Jerry Lewis “has been”, the literature is abundant. And it is excellent at that: see, above all, Chris Fujiwara’s unsurpassable monography. Li...
The Nutty Professor (1963) Scott Bukatman July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Paralysis in Motion: The Nutty Professor (1963) The Nutty Professor is entirely devoted to Professor Julius Kelp’s attempts to surmount his deficienc...
The Patsy (1964) Nafis Shafizadeh July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director The Patsy and The Struggle of Jerry Lewis In 1995, the novelist and critic Gilbert Adair published his Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Ye...
The Family Jewels (1965) Jeremi Szaniawski July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director As Gilles Deleuze put it: “If you are a prisoner of the dream of the other, you are damned,” or, closer to Deleuze’s words, “you are screwed.” And it ...
Three on a Couch (1966) Chris Fujiwara July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Lewis often structures his films around a therapeutic theme: a character needs to be cured of some affliction or has a problem – at least partly inter...
The Big Mouth (1967) Steven Shaviro July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Hitchcockian Comedy and Jewish Kabuki: Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth (1967) One way to think about The Big Mouth (1967) is to see it as Jerry Lewis’ par...
One More Time (1970) Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director A Cinematic Hapax Legomenon: One More Time (1970) In linguistics the term hapax legomenon (Greek for “something said once”) is used to denote a word ...
Which Way to the Front? (1970) Bernard Eisenschitz July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director With his turn to directing in 1960, Jerry Lewis became one of the rare filmmakers, and today the only one, to make courageous and effective films in H...
The Day the Clown Cried (1972, unfinished) Jean-Michel Frodon July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director The Day the Clown Cried: Jerry Lewis’ Invisible and Magnificent Film on the Holocaust Among the vast cohort of invisible films, it is one of the most...
Hardly Working (1980) Paul Macovaz July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Jerry Lewis’ Hardly Working is situated at the end of a long, uncomfortable hiatus. It was made in Florida, released first in Europe, then much later ...
Smorgasbord (1983) Michael Cramer July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “Au revoir, Dummy!”: A Smorgasbord of Suffering It seems fitting that Jerry’s Lewis’ final film as director, Smorgasbord (1983, released on home vide...
The Genius of the System: Robert Benayoun’s Bonjour Mr. Lewis (1982) Sam Di Iorio July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Rarely shown and never commercially released, Robert Benayoun’s six-hour mini-series Bonjour Mr. Lewis is as worth seeing as it is hard to find. This ...
