CineAction articles from February 2000

CineAction archives from February 2000

What happened?
February 1, 2000... This is the first issue of CineAction to be published in the twenty-first century. Consequently, I felt that a fitting theme would be a reflection on the state of filmmaking at the end of the twentieth century. The title for the issue, "What...

Ride-films and films as rides in contemporary Hollywood cinema of attractions.
February 1, 2000... If cinema started as a fairground or arcade attraction in the late 19th century, it has become common currency to suggest that it has returned to something close to that status today. Hollywood blockbusters are commonly described by both...

Space invaders: speculations on the politics of post-modern space in recent science fiction films.
February 1, 2000... The year is 2003, and what sociologists call the Americanisation of the globe has spread to the European telecommunications sector... A relentless tide of US know-how and money has washed into a Europe still struggling to wake up to the...

Representing pre-millennial tensions: Hollywood's gendered invasion narratives.
February 1, 2000... As we approach our own millennium, the epidemics of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudomemories that have flooded the media seem to be reaching a high-water mark. These hystories are merging with the more...

Out of the depths and through the postmodern surface: history and class figuration in Titanic.
February 1, 2000... [...] never, never in history, has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as dark, threatening, and threatened. Jacques Derrida 1994 As the new...

Raising "film avid": the happy teen from technotown.
February 1, 2000... The "Film Avid", conceived by its eager parents, TV and its partner, the global film and media industries, is an infant of the closing years of the millennium, a voracious late twentieth century baby. The Film Avid is both the result of over...

Cinema by fits and starts: New Zealand film practices in the twentieth century.
February 1, 2000... Introduction Former executive director of the New Zealand Film Commission (1983-1988), Jim Booth, suggests that "cinematograph expressions particular to New Zealand..." are essential to generating income because this national expression...

Love and rage: Irish cinema of the 1990s.
February 1, 2000... When one visits Ireland these days, one is immediately struck by the amount of construction, particularly noticeable in the cranes that dot the landscape of Dublin, but equally apparent in the more or less continuous roadwork around the...

How film exhibition has changed in the past 50 years: an interview with George Mansour.
February 1, 2000... George Mansour has been booking movies into theaters since the 1960s, and has seen a lot of change in the business of film exhibition in that time. He first worked for Paramount and then Warner Brothers in Boston back in the days when the big...

One piece: on (Hirokazu) Kore-eda, (Takeshi) Kitano and some lighter moments in contemporary Japanese cinema.
February 1, 2000... As an ardent filmviewer, I am constantly made aware during the rest of the year of how lucky we are in Toronto to have the opportunity to see films deemed noncommercial by the distribution industry. Although it means a very intense 10 days in...

Beau travail.
February 1, 2000... Claire Denis's Beau Travail is visually dazzling and, thematically, a fascinating meditation on masculinity and gender identity. The film is a reworking of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd, Sailor", a connection that is reinforced by the use of...

Splendor.
February 1, 2000... Where is Gregg Araki going? Nowhere gave us one obvious answer, in its very title: after the passion and rage (above all political) of The Doom Generation, the completely hermetic world defined by the final film of the so-called `teen trilogy'...

Humanite.
February 1, 2000... (Warning: I cannot write about this film without revealing the ending, which ideally should come as a surprise. Readers are advised to see the film before reading on). Readers will be surprised to find me defending David Cronenberg, my...

Humanist philosophy: interview(s) with Bruno Dumont.
February 1, 2000... While the recent passing of Robert Bresson may be the final death knell for first hundred years of film, it does not usher in the end of a poetics of cinema. Bruno Dumont has created--in just two works, La vie de Jesus (1997) and L'humanite...