Cineaste articles from December 2000

Cineaste archives from December 2000

FIRST LADIES: EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS, 1915--1925.(Review)
December 22, 2000... First Ladies is a remarkable new video series from Kino on Video. It is the inspiration of Jessica Rosner (see sidebar), who persuaded Kino President Don Krim to let her produce a video series of the work of early women filmmakers. It seemed...

Women Film Pioneers on Video: An Interview with Jessica Rosner.(Interview)(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Silent films have always been an important part of the Kino International film collection. The company inaugurated its own video label, Kino on Video, in 1987 and one of their earliest video packages was a ten-film series of silents called...

The Story of G.I. Joe.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Directed by William A. Wellman; cinematography by Russell Metty; screenplay by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore, and Philip Stevenson, based on the journalism of Ernie Pyle; starring Robert Mitchum, Burgess Meredith, Freddie Steele, Jimmy Lloyd and...

Brave New Bard.(best books on Shakespeare in the movies)(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2000... Whether classified as mainstream or radical, loyal or loose, the cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare will always be the product of complex negotiations between playtext and screenplay, early modern and postmodern, live action and framed...

The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way.(Review)
December 22, 2000... by Lary May. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. 348 pp. illus. Hardcover: $32.50. This a fine book by an academic historian who not only watches the films that he writes about, but also takes his archival work seriously....

The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Cultural Beat.(Review)
December 22, 2000... by Patricia Aufderheide. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 376 pp. Hardcover: $49.95 and Paperback: $19.95. In this day and age can any critic, no matter how astute, safely refer to him or herself as a "public...

Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Edited by Christopher Sharrett. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 452 pp., illus. Hardcover: $49.95 and Paperback: $24.95 Anyone who watches movies and television is struck by a heavy amount of violence. Debates, of course,...

The Beaver Trilogy.(Review)
December 22, 2000... A film/video hybrid that exploits the best aspects of both mediums, The Beaver Trilogy is a heartbreaking, experimental breakthrough. In 1979, director Trent Harris walked outside of the television station where he worked in Utah to try a new...

Dark Days.(Review)
December 22, 2000... This documentary feature by first-time director Marc Singer arrives with a well-publicized back story. In 1994 Singer, an upper-middle-class Londoner, joined a group of homeless people living in abandoned train tunnels beneath Manhattan's Upper...

Good Kurds, Bad Kurds.(Review)
December 22, 2000... The Kurds are the largest ethnic population in the world without a homeland. Dispersed over five countries in the Middle East, they are locked in a centuries-old struggle for an independent Kurdistan. In this hard-hitting documentary,...

Human Resources.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Human Resources, directed by Laurent Cantet, tells a sad story about the destructive power of class and the difficult love between a father and son. The conflict is made clear from the start. Frank, an industrious business-school student,...

Paragraph 175.(Review)
December 22, 2000... This latest work from filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) focuses on the persecution of gay men in Nazi Germany. The title of the documentary takes its name from a section of Germany's nineteenth-century penal...

Pola X.(Review)
December 22, 2000... For his first feature since the calamitous Les Amants du Pont Neuf, Leos Carax has adapted Pierre, Herman Melville's legendary novel maudit, inviting inevitable comparisons between the authors' fortunes: precocious success followed by...

EDITORIAL.(Editorial)
December 22, 2000... In keeping with Cineaste's longstanding commitment to publishing and promoting film criticism, we are pleased to publish in this issue a Symposium on "Film Criticism in America Today," featuring contributions from many of America's leading film...

The Engineer of Modern Perplexity.(Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang)(Interview)
December 22, 2000... An Interview with Edward Yang When you think of a contemporary new-wave cinema movement often hampered and harassed by a repressive government and hostile establishment media, the country that first comes to mind is likely to be Iran. But...

Acting and Activism: An Interview with Danny Glover.
December 22, 2000... While Danny Clover's name is familiar to most moviegoers, he remains a surprisingly underrated actor. The tendency of critics and audiences to take Glover's talent for granted might be attributed to his unobtrusive immersion in the craft of...

I Want to Make Films for Today: An Interview with Carlos Diegues.(Interview)
December 22, 2000... Thirty-eight years after he shot his first film--Escola de Samba, Alegria de Viver (Samba School, Joy of Living), a short about samba schools in Rio de Janeiro's favelas or hillside shantytowns--director Carlos Diegues returned to the same...

Positive Images & the Coming Out Film: THE ART AND POLITICS OF GAY AND LESBIAN CINEMA.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2000... Two chickens are standing next to an egg that is rapidly being cracked open from the inside. They look at one another with boredom and apprehension. The caption reads: "Here it comes. Another coming out story." This cartoon, which appeared in a...

FILM CRITICISM IN AMERICA TODAY: A CRITICAL SYMPOSIUM.
December 22, 2000... Since our inception in the late Sixties, Cineaste has been dedicated to publishing and promoting serious film criticism, an effort to go beyond the mere consumer-guide function of most film reviewing and to elucidate the broader artistic and...

THE POLITICS OF ARAB CINEMA: MIDDLE EASTERN FILMMAKERS FACE UPTO THEIR REALITY.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2000... John Malkovich is not a fan of contemporary Arab cinema. That much is clear from an article he wrote for The New York Times last January. Malkovich, who was invited to preside over the jury at the 1998 Cairo International Film Festival, berated...

The Montreal World Film Festival.
December 22, 2000... The 2000 Montreal World Film Festival lived up to its name once again this year (August 25th-September 4th), offering over 200 new feature films--not counting retrospective screenings (the films of Francesco Rosi, Kaneto Shindo, and Abbas...

Almost Famous & High Fidelity.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Produced by Cameron Crowe and Ian Bryce; written and directed by Cameron Crowe; cinematography by John Toll; art direction by Clay A. Griffith and Clayton R. Hartley; edited by Joe Hutshing and Saar Klein; costume design by Betsy Heimann;...

Rififi.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Produced by Henri Berard, Pierre Cabaud and Rene Bezard; directed by Jules Dassin; screenplay by Rene Wheeler, Auguste le Breton and Dassin, based on the novel by le Breton; cinematography by Philippe Agostini; production design by Alexandre...

The Legends of Rita.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Produced by Dr. Arthur Hofer and Emmo Lempert; directed by Volker Schlondorff; screenplay by Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Volker Schlondorff; cinematography by Andreas Hofer; art direction by Susanne Hopf; costumes by Anne-Gret Oehme; edited by Peter...

Sunshine.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Produced by Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori; directed by Istvan Szabo; screenplay by Israel Horovitz and Istvan Szabo; cinematography by Lajos Koltai; edited by Dominique Fortin and Michael Arcand; production design by Attila F. Kovalis; music...