Cineaste articles from January 1993

Cineaste archives from January 1993

Editorial. (Editorial)
January 1, 1993... The depiction of homosexuality in American cinema has traditionally taken many forms. Lately, however, such gay historiographies as Last Call at Maud's and Daddy and the Muscle Acad-emy, as well as the subtext in a film like Reservoir Dogs (see...

Acting, activism and Hollywood politics: an interview with Susan Sarandon. (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Despite the |big star' status first conferred upon her by the critical and box office success of Bull Durham (1988), and later confirmed by Thelma & Louise (1991), Susan Sarandon aggressively situates herself outside the Hollywood...

American dreams, suburban nightmares.
January 1, 1993... The American suburban sprawl, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but began in earnest in the years following World War II, provoked a near orgy of invective among leading social critics during the 1950s. Lewis Mumford...

Demystifying traditional notions of gender: an interview with Sally Potter (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Sally Potter began making 8mm films as a teenager and later made several short films at the London Filmmakers Co-Op before training at the London School of Contemporary Dance and forming her own dance company in 1974. She returned to filmmaking...

Achieving a state of limitlessness: an interview with Tilda Swinton. (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Thirty-one-year-old actress Tilda Swinton, a Cambridge University graduate in Social and Political Science, is best known for her work with British director Derek Jarman, with whom she worked on Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987),...

Letter from London.
January 1, 1993... Post-Thatcher London during a chill, gray February - the weather a perfect fit for the somber national mood. In 1993 both London and Britain face hard economic times - over three million people are unemployed nationwide, and in London vacant...

Alice in a Cuban wonderland: an interview with Daniel Diaz Torres. (Interview)
January 1, 1993... When the young Cuban cultural bureaucrat Alicia arrives in Maravillas (Marvels) to promote theatrical activities, she quickly learns that people and things in this town are indeed marvelous. Waves of cockroaches flood over the wall of her hotel...

Becoming a part of life: an interview with Zhang Yimou. (Interview)
January 1, 1993... In the past half decade, Zhang Yimou has become China's internationally nationally most famous filmmaker, but to make that simple observation only reveals the visible (to non-Chinese) tip of the hidden iceberg where politics and culture meet in...

Racial and sexual politics in The Crying Game.
January 1, 1993... Complex, subtle, and beautifully acted, The Crying Game unmistakably evokes and disrupts conventional expectations about national, racial, and sexual boundaries. In achieving its impressive thematic and visual coherence, however, Neil Jordan's...

Genre conventions and visual style in The Crying Game.
January 1, 1993... Much of the talk surrounding the considerable critical and popular success of writer-director Neil Jordan's latest film, The Crying Game, speaks of how unusual the film is: one critic went so far as to term it unclassifiable," while Miramax...

Orlando.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Christopher Sheppard; written and directed by Sally Potter, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf; cinematography by Alexei Rodionov; edited by Herve Schneid; production design by Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs; costume design by Sandy...

Stolen Children.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Angelo Rizzoli; directed by Gianni Amelio; story and screenplay by Gianni Amelio, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; cinematography by Tonino Nardi; art direction by Andrea Crisanti and Giuseppe M. Gaudino; edited by Gianna Gissi;...

Indochine.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Eric Heumann and Jean Labadie; directed by Regis Wargnier; screenplay by Erik Orsenna, Louis Gardel, Catherine Cohen and Regis Wargnier; cinematography by Frangois Catonne; costume design by Gabriella Pescucci and Pierre-Yves...

Falling Down.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Arnold Kopelson, Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris; directed by Joel Schumacher; screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith; cinematography by Andrzej Bartkowiak; production design by Barbara Ling; edited by Paul Hirsch; music by James Newton...

The Story of Qiu Ju.
January 1, 1993... Honored overseas, but with his works banned at home, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou faced the challenge of making a film that, at worst, would not widen the rift between him and China's cinema bureaucrats, and, at best, might overcome their...

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.
January 1, 1993... The title of this film is borrowed from one of Noam Chomsky's books, which in turn lifted it from the prose of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann, once a mighty voice of liberal journalism elevated to the status of all-around Wise Man, but today...

The Panama Deception.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Barbara Trent, Joanne Doroshow, Nico Panigutti and David Kasper; directed by Barbara Trent; written and edited by David Kasper; cinematography by Michael Dobo and Masnuel Becker; narration by Elizabeth Montgomery; music by Chuck...

Last Call at Maud's.
January 1, 1993... Produced by Karen Kiss and Paris Poirier; directed by Paris Poirier; cinematography by Cheryl Rosenthal; edited by Elaine Trotter; music by Tim Horrigan. Color, 75 mins. Distributed by The Maud's Project, 32A Horizon Ave., Venice, CA 90291. ...

Guerrillas in Our Midst.
January 1, 1993... A film by Amy Harrison; principal cinematography by Elien Kuras; supervising editor, Ruth Cullen. Color, 35 mins., distributed in 16mm film and video by Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, #501, New York, NY 10013, phone (212) 925-0606. Amy...

The Tune.
January 1, 1993... A flim by Bill Plympton; written by Bill Plympton, Maureen McElheron and P. C. Vey; cinematography by John Donnely; edited by Merril Stern; music by Maureen McElheron. Color, 70 mins. An October Films release. Homevideo release by Triboro...

Aladdin.
January 1, 1993... Aladdin, the most financially successful Disney film ever and a winner of two Academy Awards, provides a painful reminder that unconscious racism is still alive and well in Hollywood. Yes, this thirtyfirst animated Disney feature is whimsical,...

Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism.
January 1, 1993... Lester Friedman's new book will probably remain the definitive statement on the Thatcherite period in film production. Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism includes a number of critical perspectives, and what Friedman documents...

German as a foreign language: Fassbinder on video. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, German filmmaker)
January 1, 1993... East met West when the ten year anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death was celebrated last year in Berlin Alexanderplatz, formerly Stasi-Zone, now an attraction for nostalgic tourists. Suddenly last summer, Berlin was covered up to...

Sideburns.
January 1, 1993... No one who has seen Yurii Mamin's Neptune's Feast will ever be able to watch the battle on the ice section of Alexander Nevsky with a straight face again. In Neptune's Feast, a short satirical gem filmed in 1986, Russian villagers prepare a...

Burn!
January 1, 1993... Although Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! (1969) shares many of the same elements as his landmark political film, The Battle of Algiers (1966)-the dramatization of an anticolonialist struggle in the Third World, a nonprofessional actor in one of the...

Innocence Unprotected.
January 1, 1993... Dusan Makavejev is credited as the director of Innocence Unprotected (1968), but it would be more apt to say that he served as the film's chief architect and master builder. Makavejev resurrected from the archives a long moldering Yugoslavian...

Marius.
January 1, 1993... Fanny (Orane Demazis) loves Marius (Pierre Fresnay) and Marius loves Fanny - thought not quite as much as she loves him, nor as much as he loves the sea. So the young sailor takes off on a five year voyage to the Orient, telling his true love...

Fanny.
January 1, 1993... Fanny (Orane Demazis) loves Marius (Pierre Fresnay) and Marius loves Fanny - thought not quite as much as she loves him, nor as much as he loves the sea. So the young sailor takes off on a five year voyage to the Orient, telling his true love...

Cesar.
January 1, 1993... Fanny (Orane Demazis) loves Marius (Pierre Fresnay) and Marius loves Fanny - thought not quite as much as she loves him, nor as much as he loves the sea. So the young sailor takes off on a five year voyage to the Orient, telling his true love...

Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Bunuel.
January 1, 1993... Objects of Desire consists of interviews started in 1975 and continued at intervals through 1977 by two Mexican cinephiles, Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent, who had got to know Bunuel in the Fifties as members of the far-left and...

Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978.
January 1, 1993... The English translation of Nagisa Oshima's writings is a crucial contribution to the literature on Japanese film originating in the Japanese language. Oshima himself selected the essays, first collected in a French translation in 1980 by...

The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.
January 1, 1993... Greg Mitchell, an author and journalist currently assisting in the preparation of an eight-part Public Broadcasting Service series on The Great Depression, has produced a generic hybrid of a book that is a fun read as well as highly informative...

Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hutson and Hemingway in the Fifties.
January 1, 1993... It would be quite enough if Peter Viertel's Dangerous Friends was only a vivid close-up of the two great and difficult men represented by the subtitle, film director John Huston and author Ernest Hemingway. It is that, and more. Viertel...

Un Coeur en Hiver.
January 1, 1993... A film doesn't have to break new stylistic or intellectual ground to be an emotionally affecting and complex work. Claude Sautet (Cesar et Rosalie ) is a classical French director who eschews formal virtuosity for a strong, coherent narrative,...

The Dark Half.
January 1, 1993... George Romero's gritty, low budget horror films offered an intriguing mixture of Grand Guignol-style gore and unpretentious social commentary. The Night of the Living Dead was a wittily macabre response to nuclear paranoia, while Dawn of the...

Dave.
January 1, 1993... Ivan Reitman's Dave is a movie about a nice guy becoming President of the United States. It's a premise we haven't had to consider since 1976, and, to some extent, we should thank Reitman just for raising again the possibility of sincerity in...

Man Bites Dog.
January 1, 1993... In this controversial, sardonic Belgian film, written and directed by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel, and Benolt Poelvoorde, a documentary film crew attempts to chronicle the activities of Ben, a serial murderer. The film not only addresses the...

Visions of Light.
January 1, 1993... While many may see Visions of Light as the self-affirming argument of the cinematographer against the auteur theory, this concise collection of interviews and film clips not only celebrates those behind the camera but also provides valuable...