Cineaste articles from September 1995

Cineaste archives from September 1995

Editorial. (film and US society)
September 22, 1995... Not long ago, Senator Robert Dole made a clumsy attempt to distinguish between films that wallowed in "nightmares of depravity" and supposedly wholesome movies that could be safely regarded as "friendly to the family." The inconsistencies of...

Beyond neorealism: preserving a cinema of social conscience. (interview with director Gianni Amelio)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... An Interview with Gianni Amelio Although much of the Italian director Gianni Amelio's work, primarily films commissioned by Italian television, has not been screened in the United States, the four features that American filmgoers have had...

Clueless kids. (adolescence on film)
September 22, 1995... In a serendipitous bit of counterprogramming, Amy Heckerling's Clueless and Larry Clark's Kids served as last summer's perfect ying/yang double bill, a teen-oriented twinpack downright dialectic in its oppositions: sunny California/dingy New...

Bullets, ballots and Bibles: documenting the history of the gay and lesbian struggle in America ('Coming Out Under Fire,' 'Ballot Measure 9' and 'One Nation Under God')
September 22, 1995... (Coming Out Under Fire, Ballot Measure 9 and One Nation Under God) Although 'coming out' continues to be the primary theme of documentaries produced about the gay and lesbian community, this focus is changing as filmmakers have begun to explore...

How clean was my valley: Todd Hayne's 'Safe.'
September 22, 1995... Todd Haynes has set his latest film, Safe, in 1987, when the toll taken by the Reagan presidency had already become widely apparent, and when one of the decades emblematic obsessions - being in control, if not publicly then at least personally -...

Filming the Chicano family saga. (interview with director Gregory Nava)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... An Interview with Gregory Nava The independent film El Norte (1983) was the first U.S. feature in the 1980s to portray believable and well-rounded Latin American characters attempting to take charge of their own troubled lives. In his debut...

The Writers Guild of America vs. the Blacklist.
September 22, 1995... Cineaste is pleased to announce that Joel Hodson's article, "Who Wrote Lawrence of Arabia?: Sam Spiegel and David Lean's Denial of Credit to a Blacklisted Screenwriter," published in our October 1994 (Vol. XX, No. 4) issue, played an instrumental...

Lawrence of Arabia: elements and facets of the theme.
September 22, 1995... 1: A man attempts to shed one identity (English) and to assume another (Arab). He cannot achieve the latter goal; neither can he turn back to his previous identity and earlier values. In trying to serve two masters, Lawrence betrayed them both....

Apologia. (portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in 'Lawrence of Arabia')
September 22, 1995... T.E. Lawrence was quite recently alive and several people still alive remember him. Some of these loved him, some disliked him, all agree that he was very remarkable. Any serious student of the period whose studies bring him to the historical...

Disney's 'politically correct' Pocahontas. (animated film)(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 5)
September 22, 1995... When I walked into the theater to see Pocahontas, I had my choice of venue. It was playing on three of six screens, and the line waiting to get in never seemed to diminish. Later, I looked at the film section of the local paper and found that...

The long march from Wong to Woo: Asians in Hollywood.(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 5)
September 22, 1995... On International Women's Day in 1994, I was honored at the Directors Guild of America by becoming the youngest recipient of the Women in Film Achievement Award. Stevie Wonder, my hero, congratulated me, and CNN Entertainment asked how I felt....

An incredibly true cinematic adventure: an interview with Maria Maggenti. (director)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... After studying philosophy and Greek and Latin classics at Smith-College, Maria Maggenti moved to New York where she worked briefly in television commercials and the production of gay rights and AIDS activist documentaries before enrolling in...

Burnt by the Sun.
September 22, 1995... One of the murkier chapters in the history of the Soviet security services relates to their activity among 'White' emigre groups, especially in the two decades after the 1917 Revolution. The capitals of Central and Western Europe pulsated with...

Smoke.
September 22, 1995... Paul Auster writes cool, enigmatic novels (City of Glass, The Music of Chance) about the mysterious patterns underlying our daily lives. His first screenplay, Smoke, functionally directed by Wayne Wang (Chan is Missing, The Joy Luck Club) from an...

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.
September 22, 1995... Maria Maggenti's light romantic comedy, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love offers a cheerfully normalizing view of queer relationships. The film is weakened by some amateurish acting, and the plot climaxes with a bit of...

Cinema of the New Deal.
September 22, 1995... The timing for the release of this three-volume series of videos could not be better. Assorted conservatives and outright reactionaries are busy telling us that free market dynamics, privatizing, and leaner (definitely meaner) government will...

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
September 22, 1995... New York's colorful and often acerbic circle of writers, who gathered for lunch (and often breakfast and dinner) in the 1920s at the fashionable Algonquin Hotel, serves as the backdrop for director Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious...

Heavenly Creatures.
September 22, 1995... In the opening sequence of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, a travelogue film details the wonders and beauties of Christchurch, a seemingly bucolic New Zealand community. These scenes of steepled churches, rolling hills, and lush dales are...

Othello.
September 22, 1995... When Orson Welles's Othello was rereleased in 1992 in a restored version, several Welles scholars complained that although the digitally corrected soundtrack and rerecording of the score had technically improved the overall sound quality, they...

Platoon.
September 22, 1995... Nearly a decade after its release, Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), notwithstanding its various esthetic and political shortcomings, remains distinguished as the most authentic cinematic portrayal of the experience of U.S. troops in Vietnam....

Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film.
September 22, 1995... That now almost extinct species, the moviegoer looking for an alternative to the Hollywood movie, looked chiefly to French film in the Thirties and to Italian film in the years after the war. Promotion and distribution had something to do with it...

Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics.
September 22, 1995... That now almost extinct species, the moviegoer looking for an alternative to the Hollywood movie, looked chiefly to French film in the Thirties and to Italian film in the years after the war. Promotion and distribution had something to do with it...

The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories.
September 22, 1995... Analyzing a sequence in Stagecoach in his fine monograph on the film in the BFI Classics series, Ed Buscombe pauses for a rhetorical question: "Who, shooting a Western in Hollywood in 1938, would suppose that 50 years later every shot would be...

Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film.
September 22, 1995... Given the fact that film studies is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, this book may in some respects provide a model. Film scholars have, in recent decades, shed a previous reliance on an arcane vocabulary accessible only to initiates. If...

The Films of Vincente Minnelli.
September 22, 1995... The critical position of James Naremore is Frankfurt school auteurism, a seeming contradiction. That is, he shares the Marxist orientation of many Frankfurt school intellectuals but not their disdain for the artifacts of mass culture. (To be...

National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema.
September 22, 1995... A range of new critical work in cultural studies in India is increasingly found in periodicals like the Bombay left journal The Economic and Political Weekly and in the newer Journal of Arts and Ideas from New Delhi. In the area of film, the...