Cineaste articles from January 1995

Cineaste archives from January 1995

The mythology of the Western: Hollywood perspectives on race and gender in the Nineties.
January 1, 1995... Whatever a Western once was, today it seems to be all things to all people - an object of nostalgia; a chance to reclaim forgotten history, an underused vehicle for violent action, just another costume drama, or a novel setting for the...

Comedy, communism, and pastry: an interview with Nanni Moretti. (Italian filmmaker and actor) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... The films of Nanni Moretti, the Italian actor-writer-director, are almost perversely unclassifiable. The fact that Moretti makes comedies that are only intermittently funny, and political films that can never be reduced to doctrinaire platitudes,...

'Strawberry and Chocolate,' ice cream and tolerance: interviews with Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio. (Cuban filmmakers) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Tomas Gutierrez Alea has been the most prominent of the filmmakers working in Cuba's government-supported film institute, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC). Gutierrez Alea is a committed revolutionary; and his...

An interview with Juan Carlos Tabio. (Cuban filmmaker) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Cineaste: Why did you and Gutierrez Alea codirect the film? How did you divide the work as codirectors, and what special difficulties did you encounter in working together? Juan Carlos Tabio: The reason we codirected is quite simple. Two weeks...

Homosexuality and the Revolution: an interview with Jorge Perugorria. (Cuban actor) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Cuban actor Jorge Perugorria was interviewed in Havana in May 1994 by Johannes Birringer, who also translated their discussion for publication. Cineaste: Would you comment on your character in the film and your preparation for the role?...

Requiem for Soviet cinema 1917-1991.
January 1, 1995... The first time I saw Eisenstein's Potemkin was in Havana, in revolutionary Cuba, many years ago. At the climax, the audience itself provided the soundtrack of cheers for the victorious, insurgent sailors as their battleship sailed, unchallenged,...

Black nationhood and the rest in the West: an interview with Isaac Julien. (British filmmaker) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... In an age when middle class academics descend on the black ghetto with a magnifying glass, Isaac Julien is a luminary of a different kind. For more than ten years now, Julien's films and videos have explored the cultural makeup of identity in the...

In search of Asian American cinema. (Race in Contemporary American Cinema, part 3)
January 1, 1995... What is Asian American Cinema, anyway?" The question came from a colleague in the discussion group that had formed to discuss a film and video series I had programmed for the Institute for Cinema and Culture at the University of Iowa, and the...

The politics of the hyphen. (defining Asian American cinema)
January 1, 1995... The term 'Asian American' evolved out of the emergency racial consciousness associated with the civil rights movement; as such, the term has meaning primarily because it was coined by Asians, as opposed to the term 'Oriental,' which was applied...

So many alternatives: the alternative AIDS video movement.
January 1, 1995... In our last issue, videomaker, media activist, and author Alexandra Juhasz introduced the alternative AIDS film and video movement, one made up independent producers who often have close links to the communities at risk and, in some cases, are...

There should be no scissors in your mind: an interview with Helke Sander. (German filmmaker) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Helke Sander's central importance in the emergence of a left feminist film discourse in Germany is now beyond question. She was the driving force behind the establishment of one of the earliest feminist groups which developed as the German New...

Progress and misgivings in Mississippi: an interview with Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford. (American filmmakers) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Winner of the 1994 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary and the International Documentary Association's Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award, Freedom on My Mind revisits the Mississippi Voter Registration Project of 1961-64 by...

The golden age of film music. (Sound and Music in the Movies)
January 1, 1995... That overworked term, 'The Golden Age of Hollywood,' is too slippery to be of much use, but it is possible to define a Golden Age of Hollywood music within a year or two at either end. The Golden Age began in 1935 or 1936 and was essentially over...

Sync tanks: the art and technique of postproduction sound. (includes related article) (Sound and Music in the Movies)
January 1, 1995... The credits for John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) include Wyatt Earp as technical consultant(1) but only one person responsible for all of postproduction sound (the composer). The credits for Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp (1994) list the...

Film music: the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Sound and Music in the Movies)
January 1, 1995... Some five minutes into John Huston's 1960 The Unforgiven, Audrey Hepburn, who plays a spirited young Native American woman adopted by a white family, hops on a horse and rides bareback into some Wild-West scenery. On the music track, the score by...

The sound of sound: a brief history of the reproduction of sound in movie theaters. (Sound and Music in the Movies)
January 1, 1995... What should sound sound like? When you stand in the stereo showroom, or when you move your speakers around the family room, how do you know when the sound sounds right? When THX creator Tomlinson Holman designs crossover circuitry or specifies...

The state of film music criticism. (Sound and Music in the Movies)
January 1, 1995... "Film music is ripe, not to say sufficiently putrid, for regular and widespread criticism." British music critic Hans Keller made this remark almost fifty years ago, and we may well wonder whether the situation has improved. Has film music...

Music at the service of the cinema: an interview with Ennio Morricone. (Italian filmmaker) (Sound and Music in the Movies) (Interview)
January 1, 1995... Ennio Morricone occupies a unique place in the history of twentieth-century music. He is without question one of the world's most successful, and brilliant, composers for film, although he continues to write surprising music for the concert hall...

Freedom on My Mind. (motion picture)
January 1, 1995... Near the end of Freedom on My Mind, a white male volunteer in the Mississippi voter registration project of 1964 attempts a summary statement of the enduring significance of 'Freedom Summer,' affirming the value of "ideas that speak to something...

Natural Born Killers. (motion picture)
January 1, 1995... Although Natural Born Killers appears to be a sophisticated film, aware of a variety of discourses from McLuhan to Burroughs to Baudrillard, Oliver Stone's meditation on the mediascape finally looks confused and dated. After Network, the films of...

Ladybird, Ladybird. (motion picture)
January 1, 1995... Ken Loach is not a fashionable or commercial director. His films remain rooted in a social-realist esthetic which eschews formal virtuosity and postmodern ironies for a straightforward camera style and a fidelity to the authentic texture of...

Quiz Show. (motion picture)
January 1, 1995... With Robert Redford's Quiz Show, one of the most popular and ill-fated genres in television history has returned from kinescope oblivion for a second media life. Apparently, back when Eisenhower was in the White House and Elvis in the Army, the...

In Darkest Hollywood. (motion picture)
January 1, 1995... Chronicling cinema in South Africa since 1948, Peter Davis and Daniel Riesenfeld's ambitious documentary combines archival footage with interview footage of actors, directors, writers, and producers. As In Darkest Hollywood unfolds, we witness...

Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Films.
January 1, 1995... The current, thriving state of lesbian and gay studies has come as no surprise to those of us who have followed and participated in its evolution over the decades. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 signified a turning point in how gay men and lesbians...

Brando: The Biography.
January 1, 1995... "I'm writing this book for money," Marlon Brando says of his autobiography, which is coauthored by Ronald Reagan's collaborator on An American Life. He also notes that Harry Evans of Random House offered a charitable inducement: "[I]f his company...

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen.
January 1, 1995... Eighteen years ago, during my first quarter of film teaching, I terminally alienated some of my students in a lecture course on film esthetics with the following lesson in materialism. First I showed them Bunuel and Dali's silent Un chien andalou...

Montreal's feminist edge. (18th Annual World Film Festival; Quebec, Canada) (Festivals)
January 1, 1995... Autumn arrives early in Montreal, setting just the right tone for filmgoers and the press, eager to embrace a body of serious work, after several months' dalliance with typically-lightweight summer fare. Although overshadowed by the media-hype...

Home alone: the phenomenon of direct-to-video. (Homevideo)
January 1, 1995... Of the many transformations the film industry has undergone in the last decade or so, few have wrought as significant a sea change as the ascendance of both videotape and the domestic consumption of all forms of entertainment. At present, the...

The Emperor Jones. (video recording)
January 1, 1995... A valuable consequence of the new electronic exhibition technologies (videotape, cable TV, CD-ROM, etc.) is that many almost forgotten films featuring black actors of the distant, pre-civil rights past are now entering a sort of electronic...

Il Grido. (video recording)
January 1, 1995... Although certainly not unappreciated by critics, Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) continues to baffle many commentators. Unlike the bored members of the haute bourgeoisie featured in Antonioni's celebrated later films, particularly...