CineAction articles from January 2000

CineAction archives from January 2000

Tomorrow is my birthday: placing apocalypse in millennial cinema.
January 1, 2000... It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all trace of places as we know them... could also destroy all feelings as we know them, so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the...

Interracial tensions in Night of the living dead.
January 1, 2000... In discussing Night of the Living Dead Robin Wood find the significance of the black hero's color in its separating him from the norms of the white characters (he is the only non-white in the film)(1). His difference is thus the source of his...

Monkey shines: (films of George A. Romero).
January 1, 2000... The cinema of George A. Romero is popularity associated with gore, special effects, and zombies. Although the "living dead" trilogy brought the director world renown, it also trapped him in a one-dimensional interpretive framework. Despite the...

Postmodern cinema and the death of the hero.
January 1, 2000... Film heroes, or protagonists, fascinate and intrigue us today, just as they have since the invention of motion pictures. People never tire of reading or viewing narratives of heroic individuals struggling against overwhelming odds. Interest in...

Saying it with flowers: (movie American Beauty).
January 1, 2000... What is American Beauty about? It may seem an odd question to ask after the massive attention the film has received. The rapturous reviews, the huge and unexpected commercial success and the multiple Oscars--all of these would suggest that...

Apocalypse movies: end of the world cinema.
January 1, 2000... Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema by Kim Newman New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Griffin Press, 2000 272 pages with index and bibliography (Can)$ 25.99 ISBN 0-312-25369-9 (paper) First published as Millennium Movies: End of the...

Some arbitrary forays into the Toronto Film Festival.
January 1, 2000... With over three hundred films over a period of twelve days it has become impossible to cover the Toronto Film Festival. It seems legitimate, however, to begin by foregrounding some of the problems and the decisions with which one solves them....

Chinese language films: the 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2000.
January 1, 2000... Perhaps the greatest "cinematographic" experience in Hong Kong is one that's always available, the view from the Kowloon waterfront to Hong Kong Island: a sweep of Causeway Bay, Wanchai and Central's skyscrapers in an extreme long shot, super...

Douglas Sirk: 1900-1987.
January 1, 2000... The year 2000 marks the centenary of Douglas Sirk, and given the theme of this issue on exiles and emigres, it seems appropriate to acknowledge and celebrate Sirk's contributions to the cinema. Like a number of major directors -- Alfred...

Lang (Fritz) and Brecht (Berthold).
January 1, 2000... It is not clear to me just how well Lang knew Berthold Brecht: there is evidence that they met in Germany, but they collaborated only once, in Hollywood (Hangmen Also Die, 1943), and Brecht disowned the result. Yet I have the sense that Lang's...

Running out of places: Fritz Lang's Clash by night.
January 1, 2000... Clash by Night belongs generically to the great cycle of `fifties Hollywood domestic melodramas which have been so central to film criticism since the 1970s. In accounts both of Lang and of melodrama however, the film has had a marginal place,...

Under Capricorn: Hitchcock in transition.
January 1, 2000... It is fitting that Under Capricorn was Ingrid Bergman's last `studio' film (her third and final project with Alfred Hitchcock) prior to her series of collaborative works with Roberto Rossellini in Italy. Under Capricorn is a film which...

I confess: photographs of people speaking.
January 1, 2000... "We were to consider... some cases and senses... in which to J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 12. In the Truffaut book, various reasons are proposed for the failure of I Confess (1953)....

Same tune again! Repetition and framing in Letter from an unknown woman.
January 1, 2000... Towards the end of The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949), at a point when it seems the heroine's problems have been resolved, there is a scene in a bar. The camera foregrounds an attractive young woman, dissolute-looking and most likely drunk,...

Cat people and its two worlds.
January 1, 2000... In this essay I want to look at the film Cat People (1942), both produced (by Val Lewton: born Yalta 1904, emigrated 1909) and directed (by Jacques Tourneur: born Paris 1904, emigrated 1913, returned to Paris 1929-34) by emigres to the U.S. In...

On and around My best friend's wedding.
January 1, 2000... I want to discuss My Best Friend's Wedding in relation to three associated topics: its relation to classic screwball comedy and the other recent attempts to rethink that genre in contemporary terms; its auteurist relationship with Muriel's...

2001 revisited.
January 1, 2000... During my early adolescence I considered Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to represent Hollywood cinema's supreme achievement. The fact that my enthusiasm for the film was shared by many others was demonstrated by theatres that...

Cinema of the dispersed Yugoslavs: diaspora in the making.
January 1, 2000... Director Srdjan Dragojevic, of the acclaimed Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996) and Wounds (1998), was expected to leave Yugoslavia for America half a year before the Kosovo crisis. In the fall of 1998 he had announced a three-picture deal...