Cineaste articles from March 2001

Cineaste archives from March 2001

EDITORIAL.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Cineaste has always believed that race matters. When we first launched our "Race in Contemporary American Cinema" series in 1994 (Vol. XX, No. 3), our aim was to move beyond the simple unveiling of racial and ethnic stereotypes as either...

Thinking About the Power of Images: An Interview with Spike Lee.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... Spike Lee is justly famed for raising important social issues in all of his films. His latest, Bamboozled, is no exception. As the Critical Symposium in this issue makes clear, Bamboozled explores the relationship of popular culture and racial...

RACE, MEDIA AND MONEY: A Critical Symposium on Spike Lee's Bamboozled.
March 22, 2001... "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." So warns Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night, his novel about an American playwright posing as a Nazi radio propagandist. His pose as propagandist ensures Vonnegut's...

Women, Beauty Parlors, and Love: An Interview with Tonie Marshall.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... Venus Beauty Institute director Tonic Marshall did not attend film school for formal training; she learned hands-on. "Movies are my life," she has declared. "I started life as a spectator: I began going to the movies at a very early age, and I...

Actress Behind the Camera: An Interview with Liv Ullmann.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... In Changing, Liv Ullmann's remarkably frank memoir, the distinguished actress recalls the shooting of Persona, her debut film with Ingmar Bergman, as "the first time I met a film director who let me unveil feelings and thoughts no one else had...

Ralph Bunche Reconsidered: An Interview with William Greaves.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, a new documentary by veteran filmmaker William Greaves, offers a revisionist view of the achievements of Ralph Bunche. Most activists of the Sixties perceived Bunche as a conservative figure who was reluctant...

Dishing Up Comedy Spiced with Chutney An Interview with Nisha Ganatra.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... Indian-American filmmaker Nisha Ganatra has created in her first feature, Chutney Popcorn, an entertaining comedy that defies easy description. The humor ranges widely from sophomoric urination and anti-New Jersey jokes to broad visual comedy,...

The House of Mirth.
March 22, 2001... Produced by Olivia Stewart; directed by Terence Davies; screenplay by Terence Davies adapted from the novel The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; cinematography by Remi Adefarasin; production design by Don Taylor; edited by Michael Parker;...

Thirteen Days.
March 22, 2001... Produced by Armyan Bernstein, Peter O. Almond and Kevin Costner; directed by Roger Donaldson; screenplay by David Self; cinematography by Andrzej Bartkowiak; edited by Conrad Buff; production design by Dennis Washington; costume design by Isis...

Venus Beauty Institute.
March 22, 2001... Produced by Gilles Sandoz; directed by Tonie Marshall; screenplay by Tonie Marshall, Mario Vernoux and Jacques Audiard; cinematography by Gerard De Battista, Eric Brun and Stephane Degnieau; edited by Jean-Jacques Ferran and Eric Thomas; set...

Pollock.
March 22, 2001... Produced by Ed Harris, Fred Berner, and Jon Kilik; directed by Ed Harris; screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller; cinematography by Lisa Rinzler; production design by Mark Friedberg; edited by Kathryn Himoff; music by Jeff Beal;...

Titus.
March 22, 2001... Directed by Julie Taymor; screenplay by Julie Taymor, adapated from William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Color, 162 mins. Special Edition DVD released by Twentieth-Century Fox. Julie Taymor's film Titus, adapted from Shakespeare's Titus...

The Bridge on the River Kwai.
March 22, 2001... Directed by David Lean; screenplay by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson. based on the novel by Pierre Boulle. Color, 162 mins. Limited Edition DVD released by Columbia Pictures. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), David Lean's classic war...

Sacco and Vanzetti.
March 22, 2001... Directed by Giuliano Montaldo; screenplay by Fabrizio Onofri and Guiliano Montaldo; starring Riccardo Cucciolla and Gian Maria Volonte; DVD, color. 120 mins. Distributed by VCI Home Video, phone 1 (800) 331-4077. The 1927 judicial murder...

Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema.(Review)
March 22, 2001... by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 485 pp., illus. Hardcover: $64.95 and Paperback: $21.95. Until recently, Japanese film criticism was limited to the work of a few people who, armed only with...

Film/Genre & Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays & Genre and Hollywood.(Review)
March 22, 2001... by Rick Altman. London: British Film Institute, 1999. 272pp, illus.2 Hardcover: $65.00 and Paperback: $22.50. Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays Edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Albany, NY: State University of New York...

The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World.(Review)
March 22, 2001... by Ray Carney with contributions by Leonard Quart. Cambridge. MA and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 304 pp., illus. Hardcover: S49.95 and Paperback: S17.95. The theater, television, and film director Mike Leigh is one of...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2001... Debating the Politics of Zulu It was with great interest that I read Christopher Sharrett's article on Zulu (Zulu, or The Limits of Liberalism, Cineaste, Vol. XXV, No. 4). I also greatly admire the film for the superb way that the...

Barbie Nation.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Second-wave feminism is thirty years old but Mattel still enjoys $1 1-billion-plus in sales of Barbie dolls every year. Whether little girls who spend a significant chunk of childhood absorbed in Barbie's Dream House are negatively influenced...

New York in the Fifties.(Review)
March 22, 2001... A stylistically unadventurous documentary directed by Betsy Blankenbaker based on journalist/novelist Dan Wakefield's memoir of the same name. The film is primarily focused on interviews with writers, actors, musicians, and actors. These range...

Nowhere to Hide.(Review)
March 22, 2001... After a string of quirky romantic comedies (including First Love and My Love, My Bride), South Korean writer-director Lee Myung-se sends cinema back to its basics: pure energy and propulsive movement. This is the kind of action film Stan...

100 Days Before the Command.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Probably every recruit in every army in the world has at some time felt during basic training like the lowly invertebrate of Psalm XXII, 6: "But I am a worm, and no man: a reproach of men, and despised of the people." That happens to be the...

30 Frames A Second: The WTO in Seattle.(Review)
March 22, 2001... A political conversion tale in the form of a vide diary, ballasted by first-person voice-over commentary, of last year's extensive street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization and the wider depredations of multinational capital...

The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity.(Review)
March 22, 2001... by Tom Gunning. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Distributed by Indiana University Press. 528 pps., illus. Hardcover: $49.95 and Paperback: $24.95. Over the past two years, I have had the opportunity to write four essays on Fritz...

Coming to Terms with the German Past: An Interview with Volker Schlondorff.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... The New German Cinema was never a tightly knit group of filmmakers along the lines of the Italian Neorealists or the French New Wave. Volker Schlondorff, nevertheless, is probably the most anomalous member of the disparate group of filmmakers...

Alfred Hitchcock's Mary Rose: An Old Master's Unheard Cri de Coeur.(project for film version of play by Sir James M. Barrie)
March 22, 2001... Alfred Hitchcock wryly described thc subject matter of his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo as "a form of necrophilia." While that ultimate sexual taboo proves only an illusion in Vertigo, sexual congress with a dead woman is an actual plot element in...