Cineaste articles from December 1998

Cineaste archives from December 1998

Editorial.(film adaptations of Shakespeare's works)(Editorial)
December 22, 1998... The current renaissance in Shakespearean cinema - one which in recent years has seen new film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, as well as such Shakespeare-related films as...

The politics of self-absorption.(Warrean Beatty's 'Bulworth': Will the Real 'Bulworth' Please Stand Up?)
December 22, 1998... Warren Beatty's Bulworth is a casualty in the new Hollywood economics. Having failed to become a box-office smash in its opening weeks, Bulworth more or less disappeared from American screens in less than a month. But Bulworth was not a flop....

Reviving the sixties.(Warrean Beatty's 'Bulworth': Will the Real 'Bulworth' Please Stand Up?)(motion picture 'Bulworth')
December 22, 1998... Bulworth is the most politically radical film from Hollywood since, well, Warren Beatty's Reds. It slashes at the two-party system in America, corporate domination of economic life, corrupted mass media, and racial injustice. Unlike Reds, which...

These are very uncertain times: an interview with Paul Schrader.(film director)(Interview)
December 22, 1998... Paul Schrader is one of the few American directors who began his career as a film critic, publishing the well-regarded Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer in 1972. In the mid-Seventies he renounced criticism to become a...

The French new wave: its influence and decline.
December 22, 1998... A hundred years after its birth the cinema appears more strongly divided than ever between the two choices present since its inception: Melies or Lumiere. From a commercial and financial point of view, spectacles, special effects, and...

Sentimental journey as national allegory: an interview with Walter Salles.(Interview)
December 22, 1998... In 1990, Brazilian director Walter Salles was shooting a documentary about the city of Rio de Janiero, when President Fernando Collor de Mello completely suspended the nation's finances, including film production. An industry that had generated...

The politics of everyday life: an interview with Ken Loach.(filmmaker)(Interview)
December 22, 1998... Although Ken Loach is loath to pigeonhole himself as a 'social realist,' his work - from the celebrated BBC films of the Sixties to the present - has been consistently imbued with a tangible respect for the contours of daily life. Cathy Come...

Orson Welles: Shakespeare for the art houses.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)
December 22, 1998... Orson Welles loved magic, acting, Shakespeare, theatre, radio, and cinema, more or less in that order. There is a photograph of him on the set of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) gleefully pulling a rabbit out of a hat to the amazement of...

Sharing an enthusiasm for Shakespeare: an interview with Kenneth Branagh.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(film actor and director)(Interview)
December 22, 1998... If any one filmmaker can be said to be responsible for the current renaissance of Shakespearean film production, it is Kenneth Branagh. In 1984, only three years after graduating from England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Branagh became, at...

Working with Shakespeare: confessions of an adviser.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)
December 22, 1998... I have been 'text adviser' on three Shakespeare films with Kenneth Branagh, on Oliver Parker's Othello and An Ideal Husband, and recently on John Maden's Shakespeare in Love - the latter two completed principal photography this spring and are...

Shakespeare is up to date: an interview with Sir Ian McKellan.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(actor)(Interview)
December 22, 1998... Sir Ian McKellen made his professional acting debut on the English stage in 1961 and by the end of that decade he was being hailed as the leading classical actor of his generation. Over the next four decades, he performed virtually nonstop,...

Shakespeare in the cinema: a film directors' symposium.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(Panel Discussion)
December 22, 1998... with Peter Brook, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Loncraine, Baz Luhrmann, Oliver Parker, Roman Polanski and Franco Zeffirelli In order to gain insights into the esthetic considerations and working methods of film directors who have adapted...

Zeffirelli's Hamlet: the golden girl and a fistful of dust.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(Panel Discussion)
December 22, 1998... Franco Zeffirelli, the maker of the most commercially successful of all Shakespeare films, has received paradoxically less critical attention than any of the other major directors of Shakespeare films. Olivier, Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, and...

Shakespeare ... with additional dialog.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(adding words to Shakespeare's works)(Panel Discussion)
December 22, 1998... My title, of course, alludes to the famous story that the first Shakespeare film of the sound era - the 1929 Pickford-Fairbanks The Taming of the Shrew - carried the credit "With Additional Dialog by Sam Taylor." Unfortunately, this delightful...

Saving Private Ryan.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Produced by Steven Spielberg, Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon, end Gary Levinsohn; directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Robert Rodat; cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, production design by Tom Sanders; edited by Michael Kahn; costume design by...

Lolita.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Produced by Mario Kassar and Joel B. Michaels; screenplay by Stephen Schiff, adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov; edited by Julie Monroe; production design by Jori Hutman; music by Ennio Morricone; starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain,...

Affliction.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Produced by Paul Reisman; written and directed by Paul Schrader; based on the novel by Russell Banks; cinematography by Paul Sarossy; production design by Anne Pritchard; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; music by Michael Brook; starring Nick Nolte,...

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Produced and directed by Stanley Nelson; written by Lou Potter, Jill Nelson, Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith; research by Valerie Linson; narrated by Joe Morton; cinematography by Bobby Shepard and Rick Butler; edited by Lewis Erskine. Black...

Once upon a time in the Soviet Union.(Soviet cinema)
December 22, 1998... Students of the Weimar period may take violent issue with me, but, in my opinion, no chapter in film history is more dispiriting than the steady fade to black of Soviet cinema between 1927 and 1937. By every measure of quality and quantity, the...

The Montreal World Film Festival.
December 22, 1998... The Montreal World Film Festival screens a vast number of films - most of them European, Latin American, and Asian - while showing few big-budget Hollywood works. Montreal is known as a festival of moviegoers while its rival, the Toronto...

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
December 22, 1998... Moscow's loss was Karlovy Vary's gain. Why wasn't there a Moscow festival this year? Several reasons were given when the news broke at Cannes in May, none of them very promising for the future of the festival. Still, the Russian film industry...

Asian perspectives at Pusan.(Pusan International Film Festival)
December 22, 1998... South Korea's Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) was launched in 1996 with the ambitious goal of becoming the most important showcase of the continent for recent Asian films. Following its remarkable success, the second edition devoted a...

The Galway Film Fleadh.
December 22, 1998... The Galway Film Fleadh (Irish for festival), which bills itself as "the premiere festival of Irish premieres," celebrated its tenth anniversary in July 1998. If the Fleadh had a slogan, it might be "Good films, good conversation, and good...

The Sarajevo Film Festival.
December 22, 1998... Filmgoing as a form of collective therapy for a traumatized population is not what you think of when you say 'film festival,' but the Sarajevo Film Festival is just that, and its fourth outing this August marked the first time fest organizers...

4 Little Girls.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Directed by Spike Lee; VHS, color, 102 mins. distributed by Home Box Office Studio Productions, 102A East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010, phone (212) 512-7800. Having scored a critical success with the Million Man March drama Get on the...

Mr. Klein.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Directed by Joseph Losey; starring Alain Dalon, Jeanne Moreau, Juliet Berto, Michel Lonsdale and Suzanne Flon; VHS, color, 124 mins. Distributed by First Run Features, 153 Waverly Place, NYC 10014 It is interesting that several people, all...

Amarcord.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Directed by Federico Fellini; a digital video disk (DVD) from The Criterion Collection, Home Vision Cinema, and Janus Films; 1974, color, 127 mine. Distributed by Image Entertainment, 9333 Oso Ave., Chatsworth, CA 91811, phone (818) 407-9100....

Image of an Assassination.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Directed by H.D. Motyl; VHS, color, 45 mins. Distributed by MPI Home Video, 16101 South 108th Ave., Orlando Park, IL 60467, phone (708) 460-0555. The Zapruder film has been back in the news lately. When the original camera print was...

Black Women Film and Video Artists.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Jacqueline Bobo; Preface by Jacqueline Bobo. New York, NY: Routledge, 1998. 246 pp. Paperback: $19.99. Black Women Film & Video Artists is a long-overdue anthology that documents the underacknowledged, yet significant,...

Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S History.(Review)
December 22, 1998... by Robert Burgoyne. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 138 pp., illus. Hardcover: $39.95, Paperback: $14.95. This slim volume would seem to be eclipsed somewhat by several recent books concerned with the representation of...

Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies 1895-1924.(Review)
December 22, 1998... by Martin Miller Marks. New York. NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. 303 pp., illus. Hardcover: $45.00. Don't be misled by the "303 pp." listed above. If one were to take the thirty-three pages of appendix and the seventy-three pages of...