Cineaste articles from January 1997

Cineaste archives from January 1997

Editorial. (independent women filmmakers)(Editorial)
January 1, 1997... The recent flurry of independent films directed by women might be seen as a thoroughly salutary development. What, after all, could be more refreshing than a respite from whimsical tributes to hit men made by Tarantino wannabes and ersatz...

Back from among the dead: the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo.' (film)
January 1, 1997... Incredible as it may seem, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo will soon be forty years old. Released to mixed reviews in 1958, and a good deal less than the box-office hit Paramount had hoped for, Vertigo is now considered a key film not just in the...

The last time he saw Paris: an interview with Cedric Klapisch. (movie director)(Interview)
January 1, 1997... "The problem with the postcard view of Paris, the one that just shows the Eiffel Tower and the accordion player, is that it tries to whitewash the landscape and show a false reality. I wanted to show what Paris is really like, that there are all...

A past master of his craft: an interview with Fred Zinnemann. (filmmaker)(Interview)
January 1, 1997... In 1929, in Berlin, a group of friends collaborated on a silent, low-budget feature film called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). The codirectors were Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer and the cowriters were Ulmer and Billy Wilder, while the...

The dream of a new Sicilian cinema.
January 1, 1997... Sicily, as writer Vincenzo Consolo said, is too damned photogenic," a quality that has often prevented the directors who approached it from communicating its truth. With a few significant exceptions, the views of these filmmakers have often been...

The 'Troubles' he's seen in Northern Ireland: an interview with Terry George. (filmmaker)(Interview)
January 1, 1997... A Belfast native, Terry George was just a teenager when 'the Troubles' erupted in Northern Ireland. His gradual politicization, as a Catholic youth growing up in a predominantly Protestant neighborhood, was intensified as a result of two periods...

Let us now praise the famous yokels: Dadetown and other retreats.
January 1, 1997... Dwight MacDonald once said that for the movie industry, working-class life was like the dark side of the moon. In our current blockbuster climate, it is more like the far side of Pluto. Yet even if we were to fantasize a Hollywood engaged with...

Come, fly like a winged horse ... Ritwik Ghatak's 'Ajantrik,' or 'The Pathetic Fallacy.' (film)
January 1, 1997... Never mind the ripped-up roof; never mind the door held on by a loop of wire - the beat-up old Chevrolet goes where no other taxi will go, over roads that aren't on the map but that lead to a wedding or a departing train or a lovers' rendezvous....

A peculiar sensation: a personal genealogy of Korean American women's cinema.(Race in Contemporary American Cinema, part 8)
January 1, 1997... Her hair is wrapped smoothly in a possibly comfortable bun, higher than seems right but that was the style then. She is perched on a rock, near flower bushes, smiling. My mother also clutches a small handbag with gloved hands, her legs neatly...

The mouse that roared: an interview with Dianne Houston.(Interview)
January 1, 1997... In March 1996, People magazine's cover story, "Hollywood Blackout," caused a stir in the film industry and an uproar in the black community. The Oscar nominations had just been announced and, of the 166 nominees, only one was an African American....

Hong Kong's fifty years of electric shadows. (Hong Kong films)
January 1, 1997... Although the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) is a noncompetitive event, it is more than a "Best of" World Cinema. This year, the 21st HKIFF (March 25 - April 9) packed an array of fourteen programs, including "Global Images" (new...

Donnie Brasco.
January 1, 1997... In Hollywood on Trial (1976), the documentary about those who 'named names' and those who didn't during the HUAC hearings, actor Zero Mostel recalls the famous scene from John Ford's The Informer(1935), when the British Black and Tan uses his...

Some Mother's Son.
January 1, 1997... In a particularly bizarre opening sequence, the Hollywood film Blown Away (1994) shows a republican prisoner, played with hammy zeal by a miscast Tommy Lee Jones, ruthlessly murdering his cellmate and then blowing himself out of a Northern...

Rosewood.
January 1, 1997... John Singleton's Rosewood grapples with a powerful, daunting contradiction. Put simply, how does one make a slick, Hollywood action-adventure-entertainment flick, with big box-office expectations, about one of history's ultimate nightmares:...

Prisoner of the Mountains.
January 1, 1997... Prisoner of the Mountains belongs in a way to that venerable genre, the Russian war film. Only things have been turned inside out. Russia's enemies here are not the ferocious counterrevolutionary White Armies of the Civil War (as in, say,...

The Whole Wide World.
January 1, 1997... Small town Texas in the 1930s, and Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), a spunky young schoolteacher, is out on her first date with a recluse of a pulp-fiction writer named Bob Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio). Their conversation focuses completely on how...

Belle de Jour.
January 1, 1997... Belle de Jour, one of Bunuel's most subtle and provocative films, baffled and irked many viewers when it premiered in 1967. The French press's response was especially vituperative and surprisingly naive; in a review that has often been...

Scenes from a Marriage.
January 1, 1997... Scenes from a Marriage (1973) was Ingmar Bergman's successful foray at making a film that would reach a larger audience than much more formally complex and emotionally stark masterworks like Persona and Winter Light could ever attract. Made...

Twisted Toons.
January 1, 1997... Twisted Toons: The Warped Animation of Bill Plympton is a companion videotape to Bill Plympton's The Tune, which was the first feature-length animated film drawn entirely by one person. This behind-the-scenes documentary includes interviews with...

Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
January 1, 1997... On the cover of this anthology is a publicity still from A Chump at Oxford, a 1940 Laurel and Hardy film. Stan and Ollie, sporting graduation caps and ill-fitting school attire, stand before a blackboard, their faces and hands puzzling out the...

The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class.
January 1, 1997... In recent years class analysis has fallen out of favor in cinema studies. Linked to 'vulgar Marxism,' base/superstructure debates, and economism in historical analysis, class as a critical perspective has been replaced by discussions of race,...

On the Road to Tara: The Making of 'Gone With the Wind.'
January 1, 1997... The best thing one can say about Aljean Harmetz's On the Road to Tara, the latest book about the film version of Gone With the Wind, is that it is beautiful to look at. Jacket blurbs trumpet the "rich visual detail" provided by the large...

In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema's South Africa.
January 1, 1997... While the history of cinema reveals countless great movies made from books, there are fewer great books made from movies. Peter Davis's In Darkest Hollywood, sprung from the film by the same name, offers an inviting, accessible handbook to cinema...

Film posters of the Russian Avant-Garde.
January 1, 1997... This valuable production is a sumptuous full-color assembly, in coffee-table book format, of 250 posters from the most innovative period of Soviet film and Soviet graphics. Susan Pack has long been on the trail of such posters - though each was...