Cineaste articles from June 2003

Cineaste archives from June 2003

Editorial.(Editorial)
June 22, 2003... Movie stars and political activism have always made for a provocative combination, especially in times of war. During the last several months, as the Bush Administration made very public preparations for war against Iraq, Hollywood movie stars...

The quintessential New Yorker and global citizen: an interview with Spike Lee.(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Spike Lee, along with Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, has long been considered a quintessential New York filmmaker. His films are often microcosmic studies of the city's neighborhoods-BedStuy in Do the Right Thing, Harlem and Bensonhurst in...

Doyle's law: an interview with David Benioff.(discussion of movie adaptation and screenwriting)(Interview)
June 22, 2003... David Benioff was teaching freshman composition at UC-Irvine when he first learned that Spike Lee was interested in the screen adaptation of his first published novel, 25th Hour. The collaboration between Benioff and Lee, both New Yorkers,...

Chronicle of a backsliding cinephlie, or the two daves.(The New Biographical Dictionary of Film)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... There are two David Thomsons in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The one who wrote, in 1975, that "no one seriously interested in film should neglect" the works of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, "or the theoretical issues that...

Taking the measure of human relationships: an interview with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne.(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Jean-Pierre Dardenne trained as an actor, and his younger brother Luc studied philosophy; but they have dedicated themselves to the movie business since the 1970s. After earning a reputation in their native Belgium for directing socially...

How the West was spun: McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Genre revisionism.(Robert Altman's redefinition of Western films)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Thirty years ago, genre revisionism was among the hottest ideas in European and American moviemaking. Grounded in the notion that Hollywood's sovereign network of narrative formulas, character types, and visual conventions had been tapped...

Filming Sokurov's Russian ark: an interview with Tilman Buttner.(Alexander Sokurov)(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Russian Ark is not what you might readily identify as a film by the Russian master, Alexander Sokurov. The mood of Sokurov cinema, including the many documentaries, 'Elegies,' and features, is usually dreamy, vaporous, deeply spiritual; the...

Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora: an interview with Elia Suleiman.(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Invoking the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said pays homage to "the need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile." In recent years, the films of a much different representative of...

The world that is known: an interview with Michael Haneke.(Austrian filmmaker )(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has achieved major international prominence with The Piano Teacher, which won a Grand Prize and two best acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, became both a bete noire and cause celebre for...

Cult films, commentary tracks and censorious critics: an interview with John Bloom.(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Just as devotees of foreign 'art films' and Hollywood classics have long enjoyed deluxe DVD editions of their favorite films released by The Criterion Collection, fans of horror, sci-fi, exploitation, and cult films are now being catered to,...

Errata for Cineaste, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2.(Correction Notice)
June 22, 2003... In last issue's Table of Contents, we inadvertently failed to list Paul Arthur's excellent review of Paula Rabinowitz's book Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. We hope you all found it and enjoyed it anyway. In a footnote to...

Gods and generals. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Ted Turner, Mace Neufeld, Suzanne Arden and Robert Katz; directed by Ronald Maxwell; screenplay by Ronald Maxwell, based on the novel by Jeff Shaara; cinematography by Kees Van Oostrum; production design by Michael Z. Hanan; edited...

City of God. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Andrea Barata Ribeiro and Mauricio Andrade Ramos; directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund; screenplay by Braulio Mantovani, based on the novel by Paulo Lins; cinematography by Cesar Charlone; original music by Ed Cortes and...

Stevie. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Steve James, Adam Singer and Gordon Quinn; directed by Steve James; cinematography by Gordon Quinn, Dana Kupper and Peter Gilbert; edited by Steve James and William Haugse; sound recording by Adam Singer; music by Dirk Powell;...

The Pianist. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa and Alain Sarde; directed by Roman Polanski; screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman; cinematography by Pawel Edelman; production design by Allan Starski; art direction...

Spellbound. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch; directed by Jeff Blitz; cinematography by Jeff Blitz; edited by Yana Gorskaya; original music by Daniel Hulsizer; Sound recording by Sean Welch. Color, 97 mins. A ThinkFilm release. Who says you can't...

The Quiet American. (Film Reviews).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Sydney Pollack, William Horberg, Staffan Ahrenberg; directed by Phillip Noyce; screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan; starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Sherbedgia. Do Thi Hai Yen, Quang...

Classic Hollywood Horrors. (Homevideo).(Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula)(Jack Pierce: The Man Behind the Monsters)(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... Though he has long been ambivalent about his status as a horror film star, Christopher Lee is, effectively, the last of his tribe. His contemporaries, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, passed on a decade ago. There have been pretenders to the...

D.W. Griffith Masterworks. (Homevideo).(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... "On the whole, the mass of the trained brains of America and the cultural brains of America are now in command of our great and hastily endowed universities and to these, one and all, I recommend a complete reappraisal of the personality and...

Solaris. (Homevideos).(by Andrei Tarkovsky)(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky; screenplay by Tarkovsky and Fridrikh Gorenshtein, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem; cinematography by Vadim Yusov; starring Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Yarvet, Nikolai Grinko and Anatoly...

Hearts & Minds. (Homevideos).(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... Produced by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis; directed by Peter Davis; edited by Lynzee Klingman and Susan Martin; cinematography by Richard Pearce. DVD, color, 112 mins, with audio commentary by Peter Davis A Criterion Collection release...

The Cook and other treasures. (Homevideo).(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... The Cook (1918, 22 mins.), written and directed by Roscoe Arbuckle, starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Al St. John and Alice Lake and A Reckless Romeo (1917, 23 mins.), written and directed by Roscoe Arbuckle, starring Corinne Parquet,...

A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Samuel Fuller with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry Rudes. Introduction by Martin Scorsese. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2002. 592 pp., illus. Hardcover: $35.00. Samuel Fuller's autobiography A Third Face is an indispensable book for...

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Todd Gitlin. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. 260 PP. Hardcover: S25.00 and Paperback: $13.00. Veteran social critic Todd Gitlin tackles the media problem and the result is an interesting and useful contribution to the developing...

Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China's Fifth Generation. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Ni Zhen, translated by Chris Berry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 256 pp., illus. Hardcover: $54.95 and Paperback: $18.95. This welcome account by Ni Zhen, a professor of art direction and film theory at the Beijing Film...

Worms in the Winecup: A Memoir by John Bright. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Scarecrow Filmmakers Series No. 97. Introduction by Patrick McGilligan. Lanham, MD and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2002. 204 pp., itlus. Hardcover: $49.95. John Bright is a cinematic phenomenon whose life and work have only begun to be...

The Thessaloniki Film Festival. (Communiques).
June 22, 2003... On a clear day, if you're lucky, Mt. Olympus in all its majesty comes into view from the handsome harborside setting of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. It's something the excellent organizers of the festival can't always guarantee, but for the...

The Flanders Film Festival. (Communiques).
June 22, 2003... The Flemish city of Ghent is not only one of the most beautiful spots in Belgium. This gorgeous medieval city has also become one of that small country's most important cultural centers. Admirers of Late-Medieval painting are certainly familiar...

King of the box-office bombs. (Communiques).(lowest grossing films)
June 22, 2003... Thanks to our country's propensity to judge the success of a film by its box-office take rather than its actual merit, we all know that the biggest movie blockbusters of 2001 were Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Shrek. Harry grossed...

Amandla! A revolution in four-part Harmony. (Short Takes).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Lee Hirsch's stirring Amandla! (Xhosa for power') traces the inspiring forty-year struggle against South African apartheid by examining music that was inseparable from historical events. Researched for nine years, this handsome documentary...

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary. (Short Takes).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Traudl lunge was given a lifetime to ponder the questions posed at the heart of the film Blind Spot: Hiltler's Secretary. Twenty-two years old in 1942, lunge was hired as Adolf Hitler's personal secretary, spending the remaining years of World...

Nat Turner: A troublesome property. (Short Takes).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... For well over a century, artists and historians have waged a bitter debate over the character and motives of Nat Turner, the Virginia slave whose bloody 1831 revolt killed fifty-nine whites and prompted a violent backlash against untold numbers...

Standing in the shadows of Motown. (Short Takes).(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... The Funk Brothers, a group of Detroit blues and jazz musicians assembled by Berry Gordy in 1959, are responsible for "more Number One hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and the Beatles combined." But while clearly...