Cineaste articles from June 1996

Cineaste archives from June 1996

The battle over Orson Welles. (conflicting views in Welles biblography)
June 22, 1996... Two prevailing and diametrically opposed attitudes seem to dictate the way most people currently think about Orson Welles. One attitude, predominantly American, sees his life and career chiefly in terms of failure and regards the key question to...

A Gulf War 'Rashomon': an interview with Edward Zwick. (film director-producer)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Courage Under Fire, directed by Edward Zwick and written by Patrick Sheane Duncan, was the first Hollywood theatrical release to be set in the Gulf War - or Operation Desert Storm, as the U.S. military officially designated the short and...

Borders and boundaries: an interview with John Sayles. (film director, scriptwriter)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... John Sayles describes his new film, Lone Star, as "a story about borders." It is set in Texas, which Sayles explains "is unique among the United States in that it was once its own country. It was a republic formed in a controversial and bloody...

Beyond hoopla: the Cannes Film Festival and cultural significance. (includes related article on the politics of award-giving)
June 22, 1996... Phalanxes of past prize-winners. Regiments of Hollywood stars. The Cannes International Film Festival, from all accounts, is planning to stage its fiftieth anniversary celebration in May 1997 on the model of the grand victory march from Verdi's...

'Cinema-verite,' nineties style: an interview with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. (documentary film production)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky began their professional association in 1986, producing television commercials at Maysles Films, Inc., where Berlinger was Executive Producer and Sinofsky was Senior Editor. Their first independent collaboration...

Surviving adolescence with dignity: an interview with Todd Solondz. (film director)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Never has the ruthless nature of middle school been better delineated than in Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Doll-house. Acts of kindness are returned with insults; cruelties visited upon the weak are revisited upon the weaker. No bond of...

Redefining Asian American masculinity: Steven Okazaki's 'American Sons.'(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 7)
June 22, 1996... American popular culture is notoriously male-centered. For Asian Americans, however, the situation appears to be reversed, which may be yet another reflection of the power of the dominant culture. Novelist Amy Tan is more widely read than...

Race, class and gender in Darnell Martin's 'I Like It Like That.'
June 22, 1996... I Like It Like That opens with a fast-paced montage that provides insight into the different ways men and women view rhythm, sex, and time. Demonstrating her previous experience as an MTV music-video director, Darnell Martin's first sequences...

The brother from another race: black characters in the films of John Sayles.
June 22, 1996... You afraid of me? Don't be," a minor black character says in John Sayles's 1992 film, Passion Fish. The character is addressing the crippled former soap-opera star played by the white actress Mary McDonnell, but he might be talking to the...

Lone Star.
June 22, 1996... Lone Star is writer-director-editor John Sayles's film version of menudo, the hearty and picante tripe stew popular in Mexico's northern states. Into his stewpot Sayles pours one-third modern Western, one-third love story with a twist, and...

Stonewall.
June 22, 1996... The credits of Nigel Finch's Stonewall describe the film as a "fictionalization based on the book by Martin Duberman." This book was the first comprehensive history of the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village and of the events that led up to and...

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.
June 22, 1996... Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills opens with grisly police footage of the naked bodies of three eight-year-old boys as they are retrieved from a shallow creek. Some of the shots are close, allowing us to see the broken bodies...

Independence Day.
June 22, 1996... When the coming-attractions trailers for Independence Day began playing in theaters early in 1996, audiences always cheered at the spectacular demolition of the White House by an alien spaceship as big as Rhode Island. "It blowed up good," as the...

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany.
June 22, 1996... In German culture," observed the director Edgar Reitz in 1979, "there is no more ambivalent feeling, hardly a worse mixture of happiness and brutality, than the experience embedded in the word 'Heimat.'" There could be, therefore, few more...

Seven.
June 22, 1996... Is it a coincidence that some of the cinema's most original and influential films have focused on serial killers, or is there something about the subject that reaches so deeply into the spirit that it inspires spurts of creativity well beyond...

Hamlet.
June 22, 1996... Despite the popular and critical acclaim which he received for his first Shakespeare film, Henry V (1945), Laurence Olivier admitted to a great deal of trepidation upon deciding, three years later, to make a film version of Hamlet. It is, of...

The Eye of Vichy.
June 22, 1996... After the Liberation by the Allies in 1944, the French hungrily embraced the romantic myth articulated by Charles De Gaulle that the nation had been unified in its shared desire for freedom from Nazi control. What was repressed by De Gaulle's...

12 Monkeys.
June 22, 1996... A fantasy-gothic vision has characterized Terry Gilliams's post-Monty Python body of work. From his 1985 Orwellian nightmare, Brazil, to his postmodern science-fiction tale, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), Gilliam has ably woven his...

Beyond Rangoon.
June 22, 1996... John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon, for all its good intentions in attempting to shed light on the repressive military dictatorship in Burma, is too often a disappointingly conventional political thriller. It adopts the traditional Hollywood approach...

Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era.
June 22, 1996... The growth industry in serious film criticism these days seems to be in thinking about men, whether as part of queer theory or in the new wave of writing that declares itself to be about the "construction" of screen masculinity. In the last four...

Running Sacred: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.
June 22, 1996... The display of male flesh, and for whom, are precisely the subjects of Peter Lehman's book Running Scared, which assays the difficult territory of male nudity in movies and other media. In particular, Lehman asserts that his aim is to "confront...

Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema.
June 22, 1996... Lehman makes use of Freud in discussing his subject, but he is certainly not writing high psychoanalytic theory in Running Scared. Even in the small span of publishing time that encompasses the books under consideration here, one can see the...

You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men.
June 22, 1996... The spectrum is well illustrated in the imaginative critical project assembled by editors Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin. Their two volumes of mostly British essays are called You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men and Me Jane: Masculinity,...

Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women.
June 22, 1996... The spectrum is well illustrated in the imaginative critical project assembled by editors Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin. Their two volumes of mostly British essays are called You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men and Me Jane: Masculinity,...

Manhood in America: A Cultural History.
June 22, 1996... Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America tries to give some greater sense of that broader landscape in which movie masculinities slug it out. His book, "a cultural history," is a breathless cruise through two centuries of evolving masculine models in...

White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference.
June 22, 1996... Fred Pfeil's book, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination & Difference, is notable for acknowledging this tendency of many men working on the topic of masculinity to found their enterprises - whether a book or the mythopoetic men's movement...

Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry.
June 22, 1996... Despite hailing from different sides of the Judeo-Christian track, Hollywood cinema and American Catholicism have always been lively sister acts. Maybe it's the shared affinity for liturgical pageantry - the sacred aura of the spectacle, the...

Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies.
June 22, 1996... Despite hailing from different sides of the Judeo-Christian track, Hollywood cinema and American Catholicism have always been lively sister acts. Maybe it's the shared affinity for liturgical pageantry - the sacred aura of the spectacle, the...

Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema.
June 22, 1996... Sixties Underground cinema has always been a contested territory - contested, at the time of its emergence, by filmmakers, censors, and the police, and, more recently, by academics, whose various critical persuasions have compelled them to either...

Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film.
June 22, 1996... Not long ago, the appearance of any serious book devoted to nonfiction film might have been an occasion for uncritical celebration. That time is past. Once relegated to the bottom of the film studies barrel (right next to the avant-garde), the...

Hollywood's Other Blacklist; Union Struggles in the Studio System.
June 22, 1996... Hollywood's Other Blacklist: Union Struggles in the Studio System is at once a fascinating and maddening book. Recounting attempts during the 1930s and '40s to reform the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), it...

Mexican Cinema.
June 22, 1996... In its first century, Mexican cinema produced nearly 5,000 films, more than the combined production of all the other Latin American nations. Information in English on this rich production has been scarce, so a major introduction to this topic is...

Black African Cinema.
June 22, 1996... With Black African Cinema, Frank Ukadike has written a big, comprehensive book, interspersed with a fine selection of photos, about a complex cinema which we get only 'art house' and museum glimpses of in the West. This valuable exploration of...

Festivals: Montreal's 'Politique des Auteurs.' (Montreal Festival des Films du Monde)
June 22, 1996... From the perspective of a magazine such as Cineaste, which is especially concerned with world cinema, documentaries, and independent film, the significance of the Montreal Festival des Films du Monde is evident now more than ever. Commenting on...