Cineaste articles from March 2002

Cineaste archives from March 2002

Editorial.
March 22, 2002... The rarefied critical commentary of professional critics of the fine arts is arguably so culturally intimidating that even frequent visitors to museums and art galleries are often reluctant to venture their own critical assessment of works on...

The modernist and the misanthrope: The cinema of Stanley Kubrick.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Stanley Kubrick's death on March 7, 1999, four months before the release of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, removed one of the brightest stars from the motion picture firmament. Few commercial narrative filmmakers generated as much excitement...

Bringing historical characters to life: An Interview with Stephen J. Rivele.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... Stephen J. Rivele, one of the most highly regarded screenwriters in Hollywood today, has brought to his present efforts a remarkable diversity of academic and professional experiences. In 1972, after undergraduate studies at Saint Joseph's...

Islamic fundamentalism at war against America: New decumentaries on religion and politics in the Islamic World.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In the American public's effort to learn more about the individuals and organizations that carried out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the grievances--real or imagined--which motivated them, the documentary film can play a...

Alienated labor: An Interview with Laurent Cantet.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... The French director Laurent Cantet pulls off the trick of making cogent political films that eschew preachiness and refrain from suggesting facile 'solutions' to thorny social dilemmas. Indebted to both the conventions of social realism and the...

What is a ghost?: An Interview with Guillermo Del Toro.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... Mexican director-writer Guillermo Del Toro is one of the most multifaceted cinematic figures to come out of his native country in the past decade. Since Del Toro won the critics' prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival and nine Mexican Academy...

Ali. (Film Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Produced by Jon Peters, James Lassiter, Paul Ardaji, Michael Mann, and A. Kitman Ho; directed by Michael Mann; screenplay by Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, and Michael Mann; story by Gregory Allen Howard; cinematography by...

Sobibor: October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (Film Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Directed by Claude Lanzmann; cinematography by Caroline Champetier (1979) and Dominique Campuis (2001); edited by Chantal Hymans and Sabine Marmou; sound recording by Bernard Aubouy; with Vehuda Lerner. Hebrew and French dialog with English...

Code Unknown. (Film Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Produced by Alain Sarde and Marin Karmitz; written and directed by Michael Haneke; cinematography by Jurgen Jurges; production design by Manu de Chauvigny; edited by Andreas Prochaska and Karin Hartusch; costumes by Francoise Clavel; starring...

Baran. (Film Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Produced by Majid Majidi and Fouad Nahas; written and directed by Majid Majidi; cinematography by Mohammed Davudi; production design by Behzad Kazzazi; edited by Hassan Hassandust; music by Ahmad Pemjan; starring Hossein Abedini, Zahra Barami,...

No Man's Land. (Film Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Produced by Marc Baschet; directed and written by Danis Tanovic; cinematography by Walther van den Ende; production design by Dusko Milavec; edited by Francesca Calvelli; costumes by Zvonka Makuc; original music by Danis Tanovic; Starring...

"If this be a man..." Eichmann on trial in the specialist. (Home Video).
March 22, 2002... With all due respect to OJ and Johnny Cochran, what very likely was the trial of the twentieth century began in the newly constructed premises of the Beth Ha'am, the House of the People, in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. In the dock, actually a...

On the Waterfront. (Home Video).
March 22, 2002... Produced by Sam Spiegel; Directed by Elia Kazan; screenplay by Budd Schulberg; cinematography by Boris Kaufman; edited by Gene Milford; music by Leonard Bernstein; starring Marion Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, and Rod...

The Blue Angel. (Home Video).
March 22, 2002... Directed by Josef von Sternberg; screenplay by Robert Liebmann, Karl Voilmoller, and Carl Zuckmayer, based on the novel Professor Unrath by Heinrich Mann; photography by Gunther Rittau. B&W. German dialog with English subtitles, 106 minutes....

Citizen Kane. (Home Video).
March 22, 2002... Directed by Orson Welles; screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; cinematography by Gregg Toland; music by Bernard Herrmann: starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. Dorothy Comingore, and Everett Sloane. B&W, 120 mins. Two-disc DVD...

The Thessaloniki Film Festival: Cultural Globalization. (Communiques).
March 22, 2002... When a film festival presents some 200 films from forty countries, finding unifying artistic themes is somewhat illusory. Nonetheless, what was most evident at the forty-second Thessaloniki Film Festival was concern about dissolving cultural...

A tale of two festivals: Fort Lauderdale and Gwangju. (Communiques).
March 22, 2002... Most trade journals and specialty film magazines focus on huge, glitzy film festivals such as Cannes and Venice. Despite the priorities of our hype-obsessed culture, smaller festivals--that offer a brief respite from the banal 'product' on...

The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American film. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Bruce Chadwick, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 366 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50 The American film industry embraced the Civil War early and never ceased returning to it as a source for stories. Beginning in 1908, with a ten-minute...

Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial visions in American film. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... by Ray Pratt. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 344 pp., illus. Hardcover: $50.00 and Paperback: $19.95. Say "conspiracy theorist" and what typically comes to mind is a gleaming-eyed crackpot spouting delusional theories about...

Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Hamid Dabashi. New York: Verso Books, 2001. 320pp., illus. Hardcover: $97.25 and Paperback: $20.00. Hamid Dabashi's Close Up places Iranian films into the broader context of the political and intellectual struggles that have characterized...

Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Saverio Giovacchini. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001.292 pp., illus. Hardcover: $68.50 and Paperback: $22.95. Modernism, far from being 'post,' is back with a vengeance, but it's not the Modernism of European avant-gardes....

Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film Culture and the Media. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... by Dina Iordanova. London: The British Film Institute (distributed in the U.S. by Indiana University Press), 2001. 322 pp., illus. Paperback: $27.95. Cinema of Flames is a groundbreaking study of the complex and, until now, neglected study...

Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... by James Sanders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 496 pp., illus. Hardcover: $45.00. For Hollywood, New York is 'the city'-- the physically and emotionally overwhelming site where lives are magically transformed and fantasies realized,...

Letters.
March 22, 2002... Polonsky Hagiography Replete with Flimsy Critical Commentary and Shoddy Film Scholarship! Even more astonishing than bad books are the good reviews they get. Case in point: A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the...

B-52. (Short Takes).
March 22, 2002... What is wider than a football field, weighs 450,000 pounds, contains thirty-five miles of electrical wiring, and rains death on innocent civilians? Harmut Bitomsky's terrific nonfiction essay examines the aging warhorse of American military...

A Galaxy Far, Far Away. (Short Takes).(Review)
March 22, 2002... Tariq Jalil's ambitious documentary confronts the Star Wars craze and the hyped anticipation surrounding the 1999 release of The Phantom Menace. jalil's main question, "Why do so many people connect with these movies and why my generation in...

Hollywood, D.C.: A Tale of Two Cities. (Short Takes).
March 22, 2002... Kenneth Bowser and Rachel Talbot's documentary explores the century-long relationship between the federal government and the movie industry. For politicians in Washington, that relationship has nursed an ever-growing sophistication about the...

The Internationale. (Short Takes).
March 22, 2002... The multiple aims of this half-hour documentary are to describe the genesis of the socialist international anthem, how it was appropriated by authoritarian regimes, and efforts made to recover it by mass movements of the past fifty years. The...

Velvet Hangover. (Short Takes).
March 22, 2002... Two hours plus of talking heads occasionally leavened with some street scenes and other short transitional fillers is a formula for tedium, but not here. Robert Buchar's archly-titled anatomy of Czech film, past and present, is offered through...