Cineaste articles from September 2000

Cineaste archives from September 2000

EDITORIAL.(Editorial)
September 22, 2000... Film festivals have become considerably more egalitarian since the Venice Film Festival, the longest-running event of its kind, was founded in fascist Italy during the turbulent 1930s. But while brownshirts are no longer de rigueur at...

LETTERS.
September 22, 2000... Returning Fire on City on Fire As the authors of City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, we haven't been surprised by the negative comments of some reviewers (in print and on-line) about our use of the M word in the book. After all, we prefigure...

HOW TO READ KIAROSTAMI.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... As a car slows on a dusty road in Iran, a man inside asks passersby for directions. Of all the images in Abbas Kiarostami's films, this one must be the most recurrent, the most emblematic. Yet if we project ourselves imaginatively inside it, as...

JOAN OF ARC The Cinema's Immortal Maid.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... To judge from the track record, canonized saints are among the rarer subjects that narrative cinema has tackled with any degree of success. Two standouts-- Roberto Rossellini's works on Francis of Assisi and Augustine of Hippo--are almost...

A New Combination: Women and the Boxing Film.(Interview)
September 22, 2000... An Interview with Karyn Kusama In the midst of writing and directing her first feature, Girlfight, Karyn Kusama was particularly impressed by two boxing films--John Huston's Fat City (1972) and Robert Wise's 1949 film noir, The Set-Up....

OR THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... The action-driven historical epic flourished in the early Sixties. Many of these films looked back nostalgically at the glory days of American or British expansionism, in some instances functioning as an extravagant platform for Cold War...

Shadow of the Vampire.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Produced by Nicolas Cage and Jeff Levine; directed by E. Elias Merhige; screenplay by Steven Katz; cinematography by Lou Bogue; art direction by Chris Bradley; production design by Assheton Gorton; costume design by Caroline de Vivaise; makeup...

Rebels with a Cause.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Produced, directed, and edited by Helen Garvy. Color, 110 mins. Featuring Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson, Bernardine Dohrn, Todd Gitlin, Carol Glassman, Juan Gonzalez, Tom Hayden, Steve Max, Carl Oglesby, Robert Pardun, Bob Ross, Jeff Shero, and...

Hamlet.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Produced by Jason Blum and Andrew Fierberg; directed by Michael Almereyda; screenplay by Michael Almereyda adapted from the play by William Shakespeare; cinematography by John de Borman; production design by Gideon Ponte; edited by Kristina...

Scottsboro: An American Tragedy.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Produced by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman; written and directed by Barak Goodman; codirected by Daniel Anker; edited by Jean Tsien; cinematography by Buddy Squires; original music by Edward Bilous; narrated by Andre Braugher. Color and black...

Beau Travail.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Directed by Claire Denis; screenplay adapted from Melville's Billy Budd by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau; cinematography by Agnes Godard; edited by Nelly Quettier; sound by Jean-Paul Mugel; original music by Eran Tzur, plus extracts from Benjamin...

A Trial in Prague.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Produced by Zuzana Justman, Jiri Jezek, Zuzana Cervenkova and David Charap; written and directed by Zuzana Justman; cinematography by Miro Gabor and Marek Jicha; edited by David Charap. Color and black and white, 83 mins. Distributed by The...

Our Song.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Written and Directed by Jim McKay: cinematography by Jim Denault; edited by Alex Hall; music by Jan McLaughlin and Julie Panebianco; starring Kerry Washington, Melissa Martinez and Anna Simpson. Color, 96 minutes. Distributed by C-Hundred Film...

An Indie Social Realist: An Interview with Jim McKay.(Interview)
September 22, 2000... Jim McKay has produced and directed a full-length documentary, Lighthearted Nation, a feature-length concert film, R.E.M.'s Tourfilm, and numerous music videos. He cowrote, directed, and coproduced Girls Town (see review in Cineaste, Vol....

Getting Exercised Over Fight Club.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... Depending on your sense of humor, your response to Fight Club--the most provocative and controversial release from a major Hollywood studio last year--probably involves taking an extreme position on either side of a love/hate divide. Most...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.(Review)
September 22, 2000... The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Directed by Robert Wiene. Produced for video by David Shepard. Tinted, VHS, 72 mins. A Kino on Video release. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror Directed by F.W. Murnau. Produced for video by David...

Rushmore.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Olivia Williams, Sara Tanaka, and Ronnie and Keith McCawley. DVD, color, widescreen, 93 minutes. A Criterion Collection release. With this, their second film, director Wes...

Winstanley.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo; produced by The British Film Institute, 1975; starring Miles Halliwell. Black and white, 96 mins. DVD and VHS editions released by Milestone Film and Video. The seventeenth-century English...

Speak, Memory: The International Film Festival of Loule.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... The Algarve, Southern Portugal's seaside playground, might seem like an incongruous setting for a serious film festival. Indeed, the Portuguese public, as well as the British and German tourists who flock to the Algarve's sun-kissed beaches,...

Troia is Far from Hollywood.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2000... Troia is an exceptional competitive festival in that Hollywood--with its glitz, glamor, and three-ring distractions--is not invited. This annual event, held in June in Setubal, Portugal, invites for competition only films from countries whose...

Irish Film & Screening Ireland & Stills, Reels and Rushes & Shooting to Kill & Contemporary Irish Film.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... Irish Film: The Emergency of a Contemporary Cinema by Martin McLoone. London: British Film Institute, 2000. 264 pp., illus. Hardcover: [pound]45.00 and Paperback: [pound]14.99. Distributed in the U.S. by Indiana University Press. ...

Burt Lancaster: An American Life.(Review)
September 22, 2000... by Kate Buford. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, 447 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50. Early in her biography of Burt Lancaster, Kate Buford compares her subject to another tough-guy movie star with an East Harlem childhood. Like James...

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible.(Review)
September 22, 2000... by David Sterritt. Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 297 pp., illus. Hardcover: $54.95 and Paperback: $19.95. In his communicative tone and generous range of interests, David Sterritt (film critic for The...

Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon & The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema & Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. 194 pp., illus. Paperback: $18.95. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema by Thomas Waugh. Durham, NC and...

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Bunuel.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Translated by Garrett White, with a foreword by Jean-Claude Carriere. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. 275 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50. It is one paradox of film history that as the filmmakers pass away and the films...

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.(Review)
September 22, 2000... One might expect a daughter's documentary about her wayward, folk-singing father to be something of a parent trap. Yet director/narrator Aiyana Elliott, in her moving, ruminative portrait of her peripatetic father, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who...

Croupier.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Released in Britain in 1997 but not shown in the U.S. until this spring, Mike Hodges's Croupier has quietly emerged as the most ingenious, satisfying thriller to appear since Steven Soderbergh's Our of Sight. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is an...

From the Edge of the City.(Review)
September 22, 2000... A vibrant life force runs through Constantine Giannaris's From the Edge of the City. It appears in the rhythm of the driving, electronic soundtrack, in the fidgety and aggressive acting of the young and attractive cast, and in the bold and...

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun.(Review)
September 22, 2000... When the Senegalese film director Djibril Diop Mambety passed away in 1998 at the age of fifty three, he left behind a small but distinctive body of work that often dealt with the same general theme: the corrupting power of money and greed....

Luminous Motion.(Review)
September 22, 2000... The road story of devil-may-care souls has a long history in American cinema. While the Nineties produced a spate of movies about lawlessness on the run, road movies have recently taken a more domestic turn by focusing on mother-child...

Smoke and Mirrors: A History of Denial.(Review)
September 22, 2000... This nonprofit, American Lung Association sponsored documentary is refreshingly pungent, even propagandistic, in its depiction of the tobacco industry. As the title suggests, Torrie Rosenweig and Elise Pearlstein's film is most concerned with...