CineAction articles from June 2003

CineAction archives from June 2003

Questions of value.(Editorial)(the usurping of movie criticism)(Editorial)
June 22, 2003... CineAction originally announced itself, almost thirty years ago, as 'A Magazine of Criticism and Theory'. I was always glad that criticism came first--I think in fact I wanted it printed in bold, with 'Theory' in ordinary type, but was...

Unanswered questions: vision and experience in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... In the chapter "Participant Observers" in his 1972 Film as Film V.F. Perkins writes the following: [F]ilms are unlikely to replace speech or writing as the medium for examining and conveying ideas. Moral, political, ...

The purpose of plot and the place of Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Fritz Lang's 1944 film is entitled The Woman in the Window, but in what sense is the woman in the window? (1) Assistant Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) views a painting of a woman in the window of a gentleman's club. When he...

The Age of Innocence: Martin Scorsese, 1993.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Scorsese's Age of Innocence is a film about the constraints of social class, and the antecedents which Scorsese cites are costume melodramas with either a distinctively American setting--The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), The...

Love hurts: redemption within the bowels of Seul Contre Tous and the cinema of aggression.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... WARNING: I am about to defend a film that might appear to be initially indefensible. As a result I fear my approach might be too emphatic or insistent, to counter the all too present objections to the film--a preemptive assault, perhaps...

In search of the Code Inconnu.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Prefatory Last January I headed (rather than conducted) a graduate course on "World Cinema Around the Millennium" in which we watched and discussed, over the twelve weeks, a dozen films by as many directors from Europe, Asia and the Middle...

Apocalypse then: Lessons of Darkness re-visited.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... "Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species--including man--crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the lessons of...

Vive le cinema: a reading of What Time Is It There?(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... As Taiwan makes the headlines these days in local newspapers of Toronto, regarding its ban on visitors from Canada due to the SARS outbreak (1), I have visions of a peculiar Taipei in my mind. In his film The Hole (1998), director Tsai...

... Simply because you're near me: Love, Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away. --Opening of In the Mood For Love And all the while it rains. On...

Music and modernity in A Brighter Summer Day.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Fredric Jameson, in his essay "Remapping Taipei," describes the experience of modernity thus: The social totality can be sensed, as it were, from the outside, like a skin at which the Other somehow looks, but which we ourselves...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... To the editors, One of the most interesting articles in the recent issue of CineAction focusing on Asian Cinema was Catherine Russell's on 'Three Japanese actresses of the 1950s'. Critics who have studied the Japanese cinema still tend to...