Cineaste articles from June 1995

Cineaste archives from June 1995

Two shots at Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction.'
June 22, 1995... Quentin Tarantino, the genius of the moment embraced by so many who would never vote Republican, is the hip version of the angry white guy who does. Tarantino's manifestation of the phenomenon is not so crude, except facetiously so, but there is...

The troubles he's seen: an interview with Marcel Ophuls. (documentarist)
June 22, 1995... Despite some negligible early fictional efforts, Marcel Ophuls is best known for documentaries, epic in both scope and length, that definitively disabused viewers of the belief that 'talking heads' and lengthy filmed interviews are irredeemably...

Buster Keaton or the work of comedy in the age of mechanical reproduction.
June 22, 1995... The year 1995 has been compromised on as the year in which the centennial of the birth of motion pictures will be celebrated, a date that could be disputed by a variety of claimants with rival definitions of the motion picture. But there is no...

Sprucing up the silents: an interview with David Shepard. (silent film restorer)(Interview)
June 22, 1995... Silent film restoration specialist David Shepard spoke with Cineaste in May about his work on "The Art of Buster Keaton" homevideo release. Cineaste: What does it mean that the films have been "speed corrected?" David Shepard: Silent films...

Just make it marvelous Freddie! (cinematographer Freddie Young)
June 22, 1995... An Interview with Freddie Young Although Freddie Young's name may not be familiar to most moviegoers, many of the scenes he photographed certainly are - including a suspenseful, seven-minute-long sequence in which a Bedouin warrior riding his...

On the rebound: 'Hoop Dreams' and its discontents.
June 22, 1995... As the clock ticks toward zero on the American Century, sports are all the rage. Living in the moonlit Age of O.J., the epicenter of our national identity can no longer be located midway between Wall Street and the Pentagon - as the mid-Fifties...

Social realism with style: an interview with Lee Tamahori. (filmmaker)(Interview)
June 22, 1995... With the sensational urban melodrama Once Were Warriors following shortly after Jane Campion's The Piano, New Zealand cinema is becoming a presence on the international scene. The two films have in common Stuart Dryburgh as director of...

The cinema of ambivalence: recent films from Central and Eastern Europe.
June 22, 1995... Five years after the sudden collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the pace of change has barely slowed. Governments are changed as easily as hair styles - one minute bold is in, the next it's something safe and demure. Just in the last year,...

Real life is more important than ciinema: an interview with Abbas Kiarostami. (filmmaker)(Interview)
June 22, 1995... Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami had been the filmfest maven's trump card for some time when Akira Kurosawa gave him a world-class wink: "When Satyajit Ray died, I was quite depressed, but after watching Kiarostami's films, I thought God had...

Native Americans: the surprising silents.(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)
June 22, 1995... Some past, present, and future aspects of racism in American filmmaking are the subject of the three contributions to this installment of our continuing series on Race in Contemporary American Cinema. In "The Surprising Silents," Angela Aleiss...

Hanging out with the homegirls? Allison Anders's 'Mi Vida Loca.'(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)
June 22, 1995... What happens when you wrap a white girl's story in brown girl's drapes? You get Allison Anders's Mi Vida Loca. I must admit, this film has been difficult for me to review. Difficult because its gender politics are great, because it's the best...

The political economy of black film.(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)
June 22, 1995... For most of the last three decades, African-American filmmakers have waged a struggle to become part of the Hollywood system. The economic and political realities of that battle are relevant to African-American filmmakers today who are debating...

Tom and Viv. (Brian Gilbert, Willem Dafoe, Miranda Richardson)
June 22, 1995... "At some point in their marriage, Tom went mad and promptly certified his wife." That was Edith Sitwell's appraisal of the relationship between T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Viv was the woman who offered Eliot entree into the British upper...

Mamma Roma. (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tonino Delli, Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti)
June 22, 1995... Mamma Roma was first screened at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, where it was immediately sequestered on absurd charges of immorality and not released for theatrical distribution in Italy until a month later. It was shown in the United States only...

Before the Rain. (Milcho Manchevski, Katrin Cartlidge, Rade Serbedzija, Gregoire Colin, Labina Mitevska)
June 22, 1995... Inside an ancient Orthodox monastery covered with elaborate pre-Renaissance frescoes of biblical scenes, a simple Mass is in progress attended by a small group of monks. Outside in a stunning mountain landscape under a sky that threatens rain,...

Cinema across the oceans: an interview with Milcho Manchevski. (director)(Interview)
June 22, 1995... Milcho Manchevski was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1962. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a doctor, died before he, an only child, was fourteen. Raised by "himself" and an aunt, he graduated from high school in Skopje, having already...

The Madness of King George.
June 22, 1995... A mental malady afflicting the chief of state poses its own peculiar menace to the health of the realm. It may be cynically suggested that narcissism and paranoia often constitute the native soil for rulership to flourish. When these traits ripen...

Harry Bridges: A Man and His Union.
June 22, 1995... Film biographies on labor leaders too often inspire deep affection for the sacrifices and skills of individual leaders, while doing nothing to educate the viewers on unionism, class solidarity, or capitalism. In the end, they promote a 'top...

Weimar Cinema's Greatest Hits.(Home Video)
June 22, 1995... As the century draws to a close, Weimar Germany increasingly seems the principal crucible of our modernity. Far more than France or the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the ill-fated Weimar Republic feels closer to us. Dynamic and unstable, productive...

Oleanna.
June 22, 1995... A film about sexual harassment is a film with a built-in controversy. Like abortion, the topic occasions nothing close to a reasonable debate in this country at this particular moment. David Mamet's Oleanna, the film adapted from his long-running...

Richard III.
June 22, 1995... Laurence Olivier's Richard III has been available on videotape for some years now, but The Voyager Company's new Criterion Collection laserdisc qualifies as a "restoration," albeit a nontheatrical one, since it reincorporates some twenty minutes...

A second look. (social values in the film 'Boys Town')
June 22, 1995... Boys Town is the kind of mawkish, contrived Thirties social melodrama that normally does not deserve a second look. Spencer Tracy may have won an Academy Award in 1938 for his understated performance as the tough, indomitable, socially committed...

The Carthage Film Festival.(Festivals)
June 22, 1995... Up until the digging of the Suez Canal, Africa and Asia were physically linked. The Maghreb (in Arabic, literally the 'West') has always been a meeting place for the various cultures of the sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern part of the Arab...

Romance and the 'Yellow Peril': Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction.
June 22, 1995... In the heyday of what academic film studies now calls 'Seventies theory,' to write clearly was a sign that one was, at best, simple-minded, unhip, irredeemably bourgeois. Nearly two decades later, this viewpoint is at last losing its cachet. Even...

Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.
June 22, 1995... In the heyday of what academic film studies now calls 'Seventies theory,' to write clearly was a sign that one was, at best, simple-minded, unhip, irredeemably bourgeois. Nearly two decades later, this viewpoint is at last losing its cachet. Even...

The Political Companion to American Film.
June 22, 1995... Despite the fact that a certain strand of postmodernism advocates a fashionable nihilism, Cineaste has learned the lessons of the postmodern left (i.e., the validity of the autonomous struggles of women, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians)...

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
June 22, 1995... The title of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's newly coauthored study, Unthinking Eurocentrism, should be considered in at least two ways that point to the enormous challenge of writing a coherent and useful book about the construction and...