Cineaste articles from December 1999

Cineaste archives from December 1999

EDITORIAL.(Editorial)
December 22, 1999... Pretension, publicity stunt, self-irony, or sincere self-expression--Dogma '95 elicits a range of critical assessments as contradictory as some parts of the manifesto itself, established by its collective of founding filmmakers in Copenhagen in...

Getting Out of My Head: An Interview with Edward Norton.(Interview)
December 22, 1999... Edward Norton's emergence as one of the most powerful actors in American films has ironically coincided with one of those eras in movie culture when esthetics have taken precedence over artistry. Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt...

"Has the Jury Reached Its Verdict?": DELIBERATING THE CASE OF CINEMA AND THE LAW.
December 22, 1999... Film and the law have always enjoyed a synergistic relationship. Made-to-order legal process narratives--trimmed of their procedural fat--play themselves out regularly on film and television screens. Beyond the obvious courtroom drama,...

Memories of Underdevelopment, Thirty Years Later: An Interview with Sergio Corrieri.(Interview)
December 22, 1999... Getting an interview with Sergio Corrieri, as a Cuban might say, "no es facil." I spent four weeks in Cuba in August 1998 doing research at the Jose Marti National Library in Havana. Years before I had seen and written about Memorias del...

A Woman's Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat.
December 22, 1999... "Art or Porn?" ran the headline in a film-industry trade paper. "The most sexually explicit mainstream movie ever," said The New York Post. Taking the cue, advertising managers for a Seattle newspaper, who admitted that they had not seen the...

The Grand Theater of the World: THE FILMS OF LUCIAN PINTILIE.
December 22, 1999... Romanian film director Lucian Pintilie won international acclaim in 1965 with his first feature film, Sunday at Six O'Clock. A love story set against the background of the WWII resistance movement, it was hailed by European film critics as a...

IRON EYES CODY: WANNABE INDIAN.
December 22, 1999... Who would have thought that America's most recognizable Indian face was really that of a second-generation Italian-American from Louisiana? Iron Eyes Cody became a national icon as a result of playing the teary-eyed Indian in the "Keep America...

Looking Beyond Race: An Interview with Jennifer Fox.
December 22, 1999... Following its premiere screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Jennifer Fox's ten-hour documentary series about an interracial family living in Queens, New York, opened theatrically at the Film Forum in New York and later was...

The Personal Becomes Political at the Montreal Festival.
December 22, 1999... Whatever the reason, this year's Montreal World Festival opened not with a bang but with a whimper. Whether because labor disputes closed the imposing Place des Arts Theatre--the usual venue for opening-night ceremonies--or because last year's...

Karlovy Vary, Take 34.(Czech Republic film festival)
December 22, 1999... The Czech Republic's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival continues to grow in stature, as was evidenced by its thirty-fourth edition (July 2-10, 1999). Though only seventeen features competed in the official competition, several gems...

The Politics of Denial: An Interview with Atom Egoyan.(Interview)
December 22, 1999... Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was the Canadian director's breakthrough film. While Egoyan had enjoyed a cult following during the 1980s, The Sweet Hereafter appeared on more than 200 'Ten Best' Lists in 1998 and won him a much larger...

Felicia's Journey.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Produced by Bruce Davey; written and directed by Atom Egoyan; based on the novel by William Trevor; cinematography by Paul Sarossy; production design by Jim Clay; edited by Susan Shipton; costume design by Sandy Powell; music by Mychael Danna;...

Time Regained.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Produced by Paulo Branco and Massimo Ferrero; directed by Raul Ruiz; screenplay by Raul Ruiz and Gilles Taurand, adapted from the novel by Marcel Proust; cinematography by Ricardo Aronovich; production design by Bruno Beauge; edited by Denise...

Cabaret Balkan.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Produced by Goran Paskaljevic and Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre; directed by Goran Paskaijevic; screenplay by Dejan Dukovski, Goran Paskaljevic, Filip David and Zoran Andric, based on the play Bure Baruta by Dejan Dukovski; cinematography by...

Providing a Film Archive for the Home Viewer: An Interview with Peter Becker of The Criterion Collection.
December 22, 1999... Although 'homevideo' for most people means VHS videotapes, film scholars and film collectors have long preferred laserdisc and the new DVD formats for their superior visual and sound quality. Among these aficionados, The Criterion Collection is...

Germany, Pale Mother.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms; VHS, color, 109 mins. Starring Eva Mattes, Ernst Jacobi and Elisabeth Stepanek; German with English subtitles. Distributed by Facets Video, 1517 West Fullerton, Chicago, IL 60614, phone 1 (800) 331-6197,...

Women of Vision.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Written, directed, produced and narrated by Alexandra Juhasz; VHS, color, 80 mins. Distributed by The Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, Suite 506, New York, NY 10019-5904, phone 1 (800) 723-5522, website www.cinemaguild.com. In the midst of the...

Go.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Directed by Doug Liman; VHS, color, 103 mins. Distributed by Columbia Tristar Home Video. Whether it's a car chase through nighttime Las Vegas, a frantic flight from an angry drug dealer, or a frenzied escape from the scene of a murder,...

Truffaut: A Biography.(Review)
December 22, 1999... by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana; translated from the French by Catherine Temerson. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 462 pp., illus. Hardcover: $30.00. Looking at the life of Francois Truffaut, ably and sympathetically...

The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism.(Review)
December 22, 1999... by J. Hoberman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 315 pp., illus. Hardcover: $34.95. I don't know what the title and subtitle mean either. Here are some possible meanings. "The Red Atlantis" is the New Atlantis of the twentieth...

Movies and Money.(Review)
December 22, 1999... by David Puttnam with Neil Watson. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 416 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50. It must have been the cover. Arriving on U.S. shores with a title change--Movies and Money replaces the original British title The Undeclared...

Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order.(Review)
December 22, 1999... by Stuart Klawans. New York, NY: Cassell, 1999. 188 pp., illus. Paperback: $21.95. Back when I subscribed to The Nation, before the current editorial regime of Clinton-boosters rendered the magazine's politics merely insipid, when they...

South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography, 1915-1994.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Edited by Timothy Barnard and Peter Rist. New York, NY: Garland, 1996. 405 pp., illus. Hardcover: $20.00. Austin, TX: Univ. of Texas Press, 1998, 405 pp., illus. Paperback: $19.95. This critical filmography offers individual entries for...

After Life.(Review)
December 22, 1999... What, if anything, happens when a person dies? In After Life, Kore-eda Hirokazu, director of Maborosi (1995), imagines that the newly dead are shunted off to a drab school-like building near some off ramp between Earth and the hereafter. There,...

Bedrooms and Hallways.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Director Rose Troche's film is a candid romantic comedy about sexual fluidity in the Nineties. The plot centers around a men's group that strives to achieve the goal of 'releasing inner feelings' and becoming sensitive. Tension builds when Leo...

Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The 'voices' in the title of this poignant and informative historical documentary, directed by David Pultz, are voices from Ukraine, where Stalin's terror machine broke and took more lives than in any other non-Russian territory of the former...

On the Ropes.(Review)
December 22, 1999... While boxing recently has become a fashionable workout for the Wall Street set, historically the sport has been a way out of poverty for those who live on the margins of society. This perceptive feature-length documentary by Nanette Burstein...

Twin Falls Idaho.(Review)
December 22, 1999... At a Halloween party where-finally--conjoined twins Blake and Francis Falls seem unremarkable, a partygoer points out to them a less convincing pair of Siamese Twins--a man and woman dressed in conical hats. These two, unable to decide together...

Women In Black.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Claudia Sherwood's provocative and Sensitive documentary focuses on the profound impact of growing up Catholic in the parochial school system of the 1950s-1960s, where many students suffered a nation-wide, minimized form of child abuse. As one...