Cineaste articles from March 1993

Cineaste archives from March 1993

The importance of a singular, guiding vision: an interview with Arthur Penn. (motion picture director) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... unemployed-unemployable essentially, not a very good actor himself in those days--and he took on the Studio. And I'll say this for him--rain, snow, sleet, nothing stopped him from being at that Studio every Tuesday and Friday, unpaid! That...

Lesbians make movies. (lesbian filmmakers)
March 22, 1993... 1993 may be remembered as the year the national press discovered lesbians. The mere fact that we exist seems to constitute news, as if we haven't existed all along. Even before New York magazine posited a "lesbian chic," before Roseanne cast...

Framing blackness: the African-American image in the cinema of the nineties.
March 22, 1993... The following article is an abridged version of the chapter entitled "Black Film in the 1990s" from Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film by Ed Guerrero, published in November by Temple University Press. The book traces the...

When the personal becomes political: an interview with Ross McElwee. (motion picture director) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... A central figure among America's 'second generation' of cinema verite filmmakers, Ross McElwee, like many of his contemporaries, modifies and fuses the tenets of direct cinema with those of cinema verite. He allows everyday events to unfold in...

The age of exploration: the Hollywood travelogue. (Milestone Film and Video's newest video recordings)
March 22, 1993... In popular memory, the classical Hollywood travelogue is a photo album excursion through safely exotic ports of call where undulating dancers in native costume grinned and cringed before overfed, guffawing tourists. A serviceable short subject...

Arab films at Pesaro. (Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema)
March 22, 1993... Recent Arab films are as heartfelt in depicting life in the Maghreb and the Middle East as the women's high-pitched you-you chanting is in expressing extreme joy or sorrow. Directors shoot their landscapes lovingly, if harshly. A brutal climate...

Menace II Society.
March 22, 1993... Produced by Darin Scott, Allen and Albert Hughes and Tyger Williams, based on a story by the Hughes; directed by Allen and Albert Hughes; cinematography by Lisa Rinzler; edited by Christopher Koefoed; production design by Penny Barrett; music by...

The Ballad of Little Jo.
March 22, 1993... Produced by Fred Berner, Brenda Goodman, Ira Deutchman and John Sloss; written and directed by Maggie Greenwald; cinematography by Declan Quinn; edited by Keith Reamer; production design by Mark Friedberg; costume design by Claudia Brown; music...

La Vie de Boheme.
March 22, 1993... Produced, directed and written by Aki Kaurismaki; cinematography by Timo Salminen; edited by Veikko Aaltonen; production design by John Ebden; starring Matti Pellonpaa, Evelyne Didi, Andre Wilms, Kari Vaananen, Christine Murillo, Jean-Pierre...

Guelwaar.
March 22, 1993... Produced by Ousmane Sembene and Jacques Perrin; written and directed by Ousmane Sembene; cinematography by Dominique Gentil; edited by Marie-Aimee Debril; art direction by Francois Laurent Sylva and Moustapha Ndiaye; music by Baaba Maal; starring...

Romper Stomper.
March 22, 1993... Produced by Daniel Scharf and Ian Pringle; written and directed by Geoffrey Wright; cinematography by Ron Hagen; production design by Steven Jones-Evans; edited by Bill Murphy; music by John Clifford White; starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock...

John Cassavetes: an American maverick. (independent filmmaker)
March 22, 1993... When John Cassavetes died in 1989, American independent cinema was just beginning to break into the commercial mainstream, and it was tempting to believe that his singular films might soon again have found financing, distribution, and even an...

The Hours and Times.
March 22, 1993... Prize-winner at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, Christopher Munch's elegant black and white film follows in the tradition of films such as Ragtime and The Seven Percent Solution which create fictional narratives around historical figures,...

Riff-Raff.
March 22, 1993... Ken Loach is a director whose politically committed films (e.g., Kes, Family Life, Looks and Smiles) are critical of the oppressive nature of societal institutions like schools, family, and the government, and give voice to the feelings of the...

Gas Food Lodging.
March 22, 1993... Gas Food Lodging is surprisingly charming for a film that deals with the trials of a bruised family. The story centers on Nora, a weary, thirty-five-year-old waitress who has worked in a local truck stop ever since her philandering, alcoholic...

You See, I Haven't Forgotten.
March 22, 1993... This book raises two rather different questions. The first is, to put the matter crudely, does one care enough about Yves Montand to read a fairly long, at times plodding biography? There are, in fact, some fairly good reasons to do so even for...

Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince.
March 22, 1993... When the famous die, there is not only a rush to judgment, but, as British novelist Martin Amis aptly puts it, a rush to reevaluate, to retaliate. For all that the famous have gotten in their lifetime, there is this big payback in the hereafter:...

Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society.
March 22, 1993... In recent years, books analyzing the cinematic depiction of race, ethnicity, and gender have proliferated, but the role of social class, especially in American film, has barely been acknowledged. Of course, there are no 'Class Studies'...

The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut.
March 22, 1993... The historical amnesia currently infecting much of film scholarship, in academic and mainstream publishing alike, is so pervasive that it might be said to affect our sense of the present as well as the past. In theory, then, the most valuable...

Nicholas Ray: An American Journey.
March 22, 1993... Ten years in the researching and writing, this exhaustive biography--translated from French by Tom Milne--represents a welcome addition to the scarce literature on Nicholas Ray. Godard's romantic equivalence of cinema and Ray is well known;...

Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition.
March 22, 1993... Brian Neve's attempt to locate a "social tradition" within Hollywood cinema provides a useful survey of political and historical currents from the Thirties to the Sixties, although his work offers little new information to students of this...

Screen Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros.
March 22, 1993... Screen Memories is an admirable study of this important Hungarian filmmaker that skillfully blends film, gender, and East European cultural studies. At a time when the battle cry is out that so much of film studies seems too narrowly theoretical,...