Cineaste articles from September 1996

Cineaste archives from September 1996

Editorial. (the 'midcult' film genre)(Editorial)
September 22, 1996... Midcult is back, and it's bigger than ever. In the guise of what might be called 'Heritage Cinema,' it has become staple fare at multiplexes throughout the country, and has captured the imagination of America's educated, upper middle class....

Making a connection between the cinema, politics and real life: an interview with Olivier Assayas. (film director)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... As the centennial of the birth of cinema has approached and passed, we've seen a number of remarkable films about filmmaking, from filmmakers as different as Stanley Kwan, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mark Rappaport. Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is one of...

Film composers in the sonic wars. (recording soundtrack with dialogue and sound effects on film)
September 22, 1996... FROM THE THREAT OF HAVING THEIR SCORES BURIED UNDER SOUND EFFECTS BY A POOR MIXER, TO THE DIFFICULTY OF HAVING A SOUNDTRACK CD RELEASED, IT'S A CONSTANT STRUGGLE FOR FILM COMPOSERS TO HAVE THEIR WORK HEARD. Even though soundtracks generally...

Neil Jordan's 'Michael Collins.' (film director)
September 22, 1996... The Screenwriting of Irish History While themes of Irish history and politics have often figured in the background of Neil Jordan's fiction (The Past, Night in Tunisia, Nightlines) and his films (Angel and The Crying Game), they are the focus...

Trying to take the gun out of Irish politics: an interview with Neil Jordan. (film director)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... The following interview with Neil Jordan, conducted by Seamas McSwiney during the world premiere of Michael Collins at the Venice International Film Festival in August, also incorporates Jordan's replies during a press conference. A longer...

Plight of the crash fest mummies: David Cronenberg's 'Crash.' (film director)
September 22, 1996... In 1974, J.G. Ballard wrote in the introduction to the French edition of Crash, that he conceived of his book as the first pornographic novel based on technology. Pornography, according to Ballard, is the most political form of fiction because it...

Porn again: 'The People vs. Larry Flynt:' an interview with Milos Foreman (film director)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... The controversy inspired by Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt has focused attention on America's most notorious pornographer and Hustler magazine's virulent misogyny. Unfortunately, this ongoing debate has yielded considerably more heat...

Past imperfect: history according to the movies. (interview with film director Oliver Stone)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... A Conversation between Mark C. Carnes and Oliver Stone The following is an expanded version of an interview between Mark C. Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, and writer/director Oliver Stone, which appears in...

History, dramatic license and larger historical truths: an interview with Oliver Stone. (film director)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... In order to follow up on some of the issues raised by Mark C. Carnes in his conversation with Oliver Stone, to give Stone a chance to respond to his critics, and to supplement our own long-term interest in two of his most provocative historical...

Lost and found: Wanda Jakubowska's 'The Last Stop.' (Polish film director)
September 22, 1996... Fictional films about the Holocaust bear historical, moral, and esthetic burdens associated with few other subjects. How, for example, can filmmakers, without being sensational and exploitative, evoke the sheer enormity of the Holocaust's horror?...

Race, pedagogy and whiteness in 'Dangerous Minds.' (motion picture)
September 22, 1996... Dangerous Minds, at first glance, resembles a long tradition of Hollywood movies recounting the sorry state of education for dispossessed kids who bear the brunt of poverty, crime, violence, and despair in America's inner cities. While some may...

la Ceremonie.
September 22, 1996... Claude Chabrol has spent much of his nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker examining the upper strata of the French bourgeoisie, with all of its attendant trappings: splendid, often isolated houses with impeccable furnishings; landscaping just...

Secrets & Lies.
September 22, 1996... Mike Leigh's best films always combine satirical bite with resplendent gloom. As a case in point, Meantime, Leigh's most unremittingly grim (and perhaps his best) film, challenged its audience to appreciate an unadorned portrait of unemployment...

Raising questions and positing possibilities: an interview with Mike Leigh. (film director)(Interview)
September 22, 1996... Cineaste spoke with Mike Leigh last fall following the New York Film Festival's screening of Secrets & Lies. A lengthy career interview with Leigh appeared in our Vol. XX, No. 3 issue. Cineaste: Did you have any idea that Secrets & Lies would...

When We Were Kings.
September 22, 1996... At a time when Dennis Rodman's outrageous antics dominate sports coverage, it's easy to forget the origins of the aggressive 'in your face' interview exchange. Capturing media attention, however, used to involve more than just changing hair dye....

Black Is ... Black Ain't.
September 22, 1996... Toward the end of the documentary Black Is...Black Ain't, after an interviewer asks the AIDS-stricken filmmaker and writer Marlon Riggs what he has dreamt about lately, Riggs replies that he has not experienced dreams so much as a series of...

Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press.
September 22, 1996... Although right-wing criticism of the 'liberal media' attracts a great deal more attention (Rush Limbaugh, Reed Irvine, Brent Bozell, and any Republican nominee for President being its most prominent practitioners), the American left, such as it...

Fear and Favor in the Newsroom.
September 22, 1996... Although right-wing criticism of the 'liberal media' attracts a great deal more attention (Rush Limbaugh, Reed Irvine, Brent Bozell, and any Republican nominee for President being its most prominent practitioners), the American left, such as it...

New African cinema.
September 22, 1996... One of subSaharan Africa's newest forms of art - and probably the least known in the Western world - is cinema, which, nevertheless, has been in existence there for more than thirty-five years. This cinema emerged at a time when many African...

This Sporting Life.
September 22, 1996... The last and arguably the best and most powerful of the British New Wave films of the late Fifties and early Sixties, although it was too bleak and despairing a film to be a commercial success, was Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963)....

The Black Unicorn.
September 22, 1996... Documentary films about poets are highly problematical. Should the life or the poetry be highlighted? How can the two be related in an engaging manner? Is the film's primary purpose to win the poet new readers or to present his existing fans with...

America, America: a letter from Russia. (Russian films with the 'American dream' theme)
September 22, 1996... Consider these titles - I Want to Go to America, We Are Going to America, The American Boy, Our American Borya, The American Grandpa, The Groom from Miami, It's Nice on Deribassovska Street, but It's Raining in Brighton Beach Again. These are...

The Thessaloniki Film Festival. (Greece)
September 22, 1996... Every good film festival develops an artistic profile. This is of particular importance in the crowded European festival circuit. Completing its fifth year as an international festival after thirty-two previous years as a strictly Greek film...

The Fort Lauderdale Film Festival. (Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival; Florida)
September 22, 1996... Few events are better for boosting a community's morale than an annual film festival, and the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which marked its eleventh anniversary in November 1996, promotes the charms of South Florida with a gusto...

The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue.
September 22, 1996... This is a welcome addition, easily the best in English, to the literature on the late Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. The authors complement each other nicely: Johnson is a Russianist with specialities in literature and film, while Petrie has...

Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life.
September 22, 1996... Pier Paolo Pasolini claimed to possess a "desperate vitality," and, more than twenty years after his death, his films and writings have lost none of their vibrancy. His work, always controversial, is still pertinent to contemporary cultural...

The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
September 22, 1996... Pier Paolo Pasolini claimed to possess a "desperate vitality," and, more than twenty years after his death, his films and writings have lost none of their vibrancy. His work, always controversial, is still pertinent to contemporary cultural...

Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence and Oppositionality.
September 22, 1996... Cinemas of the Black Diaspora is nothing if not ambitious. Edited by Michael T. Martin, the Chair of the Africana Studies Program at Wayne State University, and comprising more than thirty essays, the book takes on the both vital and Herculean...

Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films About Labor.
September 22, 1996... Until the publication of this book, anyone who has ever tried to put together a course or film program dealing with labor films has had to start from scratch. Tom Zaniello has addressed that problem by offering a handy guide to nearly one hundred...

Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema.
September 22, 1996... In the two anthologies Krin Gabbard edited in 1995 for Duke University Press, Jazz Among the Discourses and Representing Jazz, he. and his contributors applied some of the methodologies of contemporary theory to jazz criticism. Since so much...