Cineaste articles from December 2008

Cineaste archives from December 2008

Cult film: undoing the "time warp".(Editorial)
December 22, 2008... To the extent that there is a typical issue of Cineaste, this is not a typical issue. Articles of a familiar sociopolitical bent share space this time with a special focus on cult film, not an area where we are thought to be groundbreaking....

Listening to silence: an interview with Lance Hammer.(Interview)
December 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When cinema stopped its silent treatment in the late 1920s, there was the first burst of excitement ("Garbo Speaks!") and then, like the Sunday hangover following the Saturday party, a glum realization that all the...

Secularism strikes back: new documentaries on religion and faith.
December 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, wrote in his Moral Essays that he would rather be a Catholic, a Jew, or even a Muslim than an atheist. Reason, he argued, demanded that the disparate, random elements of the...

Talk about a combustible mix: an interview with Craig Baldwin.(Interview)
December 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In its own schizophrenic way, Craig Baldwin's raving collage-narrative Mock Up on Mu lays out a sordid, secret postwar history of a certain Southern California. A tangled mass of audiovisual notes, the film is an...

Bodies of evidence: new documentaries on Iraq war veterans.
December 22, 2008... He's a villain or a hero; spat upon or spitting. He's an accessory to war crimes; an antiwar crusader. He's a tic-ridden time bomb; a paraplegic demon lover. He's a Vietnam veteran--of Hollywood's imagination. And now he's joined by a new...

Cult film or cinephilia by any other name: how movie love and movie madness intersect in the always changing dynamic of cult film.(SPECIAL FOCUS ON CULT FILM)
December 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Which came first, the cinephile or the cultist? This simple question of generation or periodization opens out onto rather murky waters. These two forms of film love seem, at first glance, to be strange bedfellows:...

What's cult got to do with it?: in defense of cinephile elitism.(SPECIAL FOCUS ON CULT FILM)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The first sign that something was wrong with the term cult movie should have been obvious years ago: when Danny Peary was compelled to pump out a third volume of his successful Cult Movies book franchise in 1988....

Cult cinema: a critical symposium: featuring Joe Bob Briggs, J. Hoberman, Damien Love, Tim Lucas, Danny Peary, Jeffrey Sconce and Peter Stanfield: as the marginal goes mainstream, critical connoisseurs debate the frenzied life, near death, and rejuvenation of cult cinema.(SPECIAL FOCUS ON CULT FILM)
December 22, 2008... Most of us know someone who can't get through a day without quoting from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Casablanca, Dracula or some other compulsively worshipped movie. Other people tire of hearing them intone, "Eeelectricity!," "Round up the...

Changeling.(Movie review)
December 22, 2008... Produced by Clint Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Robert Lorenz; directed by Clint Eastwood; screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski; cinematography by Tom Stern; production design by James J. Murakami, costumes by Deborah Hopper; edited by...

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.(Movie review)
December 22, 2008... Produced by Jeffery Levy-Hinte, Lila Yacoub, Mirina Zenovich; directed by Marina Zenovich; written by Joe Bini, Peter G. Morgan, and Marina Zenovich; cinematography by Tanja Koop; edited by Joe Bini; with Marilyn Beck, Mia Farrow, Samantha...

Vicky Cristina Barcelona.(Movie review)
December 22, 2008... Produced by Letty Aronson, Gareth Wiley and Stephen Tenenbaum; directed and written by Woody Allen; cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe; production design by Alain Bainee; edited by Alisa Lepselter; starring Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson,...

Brideshead Revisited.(Movie review)
December 22, 2008... Produced by Robert Bernstein, Kevin Loader and Douglas Rae; directed by Julian Jarrold; written by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh; cinematography by Jess Hall; production design by Alice Normington; costume...

Berlin Alexanderplatz.(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; from the novel by Alfred Doblin; cinematography by Xaver Schwarzenberger; music by Peer Raben; costumes by Barbara Baum; edited by Juliane Lorenz and Fassbinder; produced by Peter Marthesheimer;...

The Lovers.(The Fire Within)(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... Written and directed by Louis Malle; produced by Irenee Leriche; dialogue by Louise de Vilmorin; inspired by Point de lendemain by Dominique Vivant Denon; cinematography by Henri Decae; edited by Leonide Azar; art direction by Bernard Evein;...

All My Good Countrymen.(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... Directed and written by Vojtech Jasny; cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera; edited by Miroslav Hajek; art direction by Karel Lier; costume design by Ester Krumbachova; music by Svatopluk Havelka; starring Radoslav Brozobohaty, Vlastimil Brodsky...

J'Accuse.(La Roue)(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... Written and directed by Abel Gance; cinematography by Leonce-Henry Burel, Maurice Forster and Marc Bujard; reconstructed by Annike Kross of the Nederlands Filmmuseum; original score by Robert Israel. DVD, B&W with color tinting, 166 mins.,...

Derek.(Brief article)(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... When Derek Jarman died of AIDS in 1994, he left behind one of the contemporary avant-garde's most stunning bodies of work--films, paintings, writings, set designs, music videos--as well as an army of close friends and collaborators. Continuing...

Larisa Shepitko: Eclipse Series 11.(Brief article)(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... The two releases of Wings and The Ascent in a single package remind us how Larisa Shepitko's early death deprived Soviet and world cinema of an acute talent. (She was only forty-one when she was killed in a car crash with crew members in 1979...

Men oncle Antoine.(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... There aren't many Quebecois directors that have had an impact on international cinema. Only two come quickly to mind--the politically and sexually sophisticated Denys Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986), and Claude Jutra whose...

The Rabbit is Me.(Brief article)(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... The production history of Kurt Maetzig's The Rabbit is Me encapsulates one of the most traumatic political and cultural crises in the history of the former German Democratic Republic. Approved by the government during a brief thaw in the...

Satantango.(Video recording review)
December 22, 2008... Released in 1994, Bela Tarr's seven-hour-long Satantango quickly joined the hallowed ranks of a particular subset of film history--those little-seen but near-mythic movies that represent an extreme challenge to the normal conception of duration...

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. 701 pp., illus. Hardcover: $40.00. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc...

Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood Edited by Michael Atkinson. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. 217 pp. Hardcover: $74.50 and Paperback: $24.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's a mite ironic...

Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema by Janina Falkowska. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007, 352 pp., illus. Paperback: $34.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] No other Polish filmmaker--with the possible...

Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong by Martha Nochimson. Oxford and Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2007. 304 pp., illus. Hardcover: $84.95 and Paperback: $31.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dying to Belong, a...

Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover by Denise Mann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 324pp., illus. Hardcover: $75.00 and Paperback: $25.00. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Many books have been written...

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.(The Politics of Documentary)(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction by Patricia Aufderheide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 158 pp. Paperback: $9.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Politics of Documentary by Michael Chanan, London: British...

The Toronto International Film Festival.(COMMUNIQUE)
December 22, 2008... Shortly after the opening of the 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, Bruce Kirkland, the conservative Toronto Sun's film critic, proclaimed that what was once an unpretentious local event had become an elitist corporate...

Index to Cineaste, Vol. XXXIII.
December 22, 2008... ARTICLES Arthur, Paul: "Adam Curtis's Nightmare Factory: A British Documentarian Declares War on the 'War on Terror,'" 33.1, 14-17 Bronski, Michael: "From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film...

Responding to a reviewer.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2008... Even thoughtful scholars I admire can sometimes make mistakes, as Berel Lang does several times in his review of my anthology, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays (Cineaste, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4). Contrary to what he asserts, not all the essays...

A poetic title.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2008... I enjoyed the film review by Robert Sklar of Elegy and Philip Roth's The Dying Animal, but was surprised that there was no mention of Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" from which Roth clearly took his title. The poem is about aging and art,...

It wasn't an error, it was really just a test!(LETTERS)(Correction notice)
December 22, 2008... Julie Jones, author of "'Above all... don't perform!'": Playing to the Camera of Luis Bunuel, in Cineaste, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, informs us that she received a letter from Juan Luis Bunuel, the filmmaker's son, who, while saying that he liked...

Beyond Hatred.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... The facts behind Olivier Meyrou's documentary, Beyond Hatred, are simply stated in a forty-second sound bite recorded by a court reporter late in the film: on a late spring evening in a park in Rheins, three skinheads brutally attacked a gay...

Flow: For Love of Water.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... Irena Salina's second feature documentary seeks to open our eyes to the new crisis of the twenty-first century, the global shortage of potable water. While this crisis may not be news to politically and environmentally savvy viewers, Salina's...

Letter to Anna.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... According to the International Federation of Journalists, 152 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 1994. Courageous investigative reporters are an especially endangered species in Putin's Russia, where Anna Politkovskaya, the subject...

The Order of Myths.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... On the coattails of Alabama's official apology for slavery, The Order of Myths follows Mobile's still racially segregated Mardi Gras Associations through a byzantine flurry of parades, balls, royal court appearances, and, fascinatingly, the...

Trouble the Water.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... "No offense to civilian people, but they have no concept of how to survive," states a U.S. National Guardsman in Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's powerful documentary about the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Ironically, the survival of regular people...