CineAction articles from June 2005

CineAction archives from June 2005

Film on film.
June 22, 2005... CineAction is pleased to be celebrating its twentieth anniversary; having survived as a small journal for this many years is an accomplishment in itself. To acknowledge the occasion the editors have each written a short article on a film they...

Remembering Memories of Underdevelopment.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2005... In the conclusion of Tomas Gutierrez Alea's great Memories of Underdevelopment/Memorias del Subdesarollo (1968) the film leaves behind its disagreeable protagonist, Sergio, and his inventive, and unreliable, first-person fiction and takes up...

Zero de Conduite: radical cinema.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2005... CineAction was created to publish criticism that would address the political potential inherent in cinematic practice, particularly popular cinema. Vigo, Vertov, Bunuel and others understood this idea; they were actively involved in film...

The life of death in Deathwatch and Dying at Grace.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)
June 22, 2005... Bertrand Tavernier's Deathwatch (1980) foreshadows the advent of reality television and pre-dates several other excellent dramatic films which play on and critique the genre, such as The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998) and Nurse Betty...

In a Glass Cage.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2005... A modern cult classic, In a Glass Cage (1987), directed by Spaniard Agustin Villaronga, is a variation on the themes of sadomasochism and the relationship between sex and Thanatos under fascism first explored by Liliana Cavani in the...

Party Girl: Ray and Hollywood.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2005... Nicholas Ray didn't initiate Party Girl, an MGM project conceived as a vehicle for Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse, but it is, in characterization and thematic, one of his most personal films. Set in Prohibition era Chicago, Party Girl is a...

Jia Zhang-ke's The World.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2005... As TV news reports and newspaper business sections warn of North American companies threatened by Chinese buyouts and North American workers by the thousands made unemployed by the dumping of cheap Chinese products justified by Walmart's stance...

Notorious.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Alfred Hitchcock's thriller)
June 22, 2005... I love Hitchcock's Notorious beyond the attributes that put it on a par with many great movies, including other Hitchcocks. For example, I acknowledge Vertigo, which is for many the brightest star in the Hitchcock constellation, as an...

Right Again: a loving tribute to Stan, Ollie and Leo.(TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION)(Leo McCarey, movie director, Laurel and Hardy)
June 22, 2005... During my childhood, in England in the 1930s and into the 40s, movie theatre programmes typically consisted of: a main feature (or 'A' movie), a second feature ('B' movie), a newsreel, and, quite often, a Laurel & Hardy short. The moment their...

Cinematic meaning in the work of David Lynch; Revisiting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
June 22, 2005... INTRODUCTION What does a Gap commercial have to do with Mulholland Drive? Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's most recent and popularly acclaimed film, opens with a montage of young couples dancing the jitterbug against a solid purple...

Looking at Lola, looking at cinema.(Critical Essay)(Cover Story)
June 22, 2005... "The deepest prejudices are ontological ones--commitments to the nature of the real. The largely unquestioned prejudice today is that reality is only what is observable from a third-person point of view, that is, thoroughly objectifiable...

Film, dreams and stolen pocketwatches.(Diamonds and Pearls, Buster Keaton charectarization)
June 22, 2005... Cinematic reference is everywhere these days. You can see it in films from Airplane to Scary Movie, from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill to Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle. For several seasons, The Simpsons was full of it; The Family Guy has, to...

In memoriam.(Obituary)
June 22, 2005... Marlon Brando (1924-2004) Method actor, Hollywood star, sex symbol [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ceylan and company: autobiographical trajectories of cinema.(Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
June 22, 2005... The sky... is the opposite of the eye: it is its immense rarefaction. If the eye focuses, the sky blurs. If the eye is clearly, albeit arbitrarily, the point of departure, the sky is an impossible destination, or better still, the dilated...

Onibus 174 (Bus 174): intention in the system of representation.
June 22, 2005... These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of...

Centenary.
June 22, 2005... Otto Preminger (1905-1986) with Charles Laughton on the set of Advise and Consent (1962), one of Preminger's finest films. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Greta Garbo (1905-1990) Star and icon extraordinaire. [ILLUSTRATION...

Seeing Elephant.
June 22, 2005... Viewing Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) once is to enter into a beautiful mystery. Unraveling it begins with the title, an allusion to Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC film Elephant, itself named after writer Bernard MacLaverty's statement about problems...