Cineaste articles from September 2001

Cineaste archives from September 2001

EDITORIAL.
September 22, 2001... For many years, British filmgoers--given their national penchant for self-deprecation--have been inclined to agree with Francois Truffaut's famous pronouncement that the words "British" and "cinema" are incompatible. It is evident today,...

Que Viva Eisenstein?: A Life for the Revolution.(influence of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein)
September 22, 2001... "You're wrong, pal," Caesar was saying... "One must say in all objectivity that Eisenstein is a genius. Now isn't Ivan the Terrible a work of genius? The oprichniki dancing in masks! The scene in the cathedral!" "All show off!" K-123...

A Touch of the Neorealist.(interview with filmmaker David Gordon Green)
September 22, 2001... An Interview with David Gordon Green Although David Gordon Green claims to be influenced by American filmmakers of the 1970s rather than Italian Neorealists or contemporary Iranian filmmakers, his first feature film, George Washington, has...

MONTY PYTHON: LUST FOR GLORY.(British comedy group)
September 22, 2001... And now for something completely identical! More than twenty-five years after Monty Python's Flying Circus wrapped its final season, and eighteen years after the troupe capped its cinematic career with The Meaning of Life, all of its major...

The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnes Varda.(Interview)
September 22, 2001... Often hailed as the grandmother of the French New Wave, Agnes Varda has been making films for nearly fifty years. Her latest film, The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse)--awarded the Melies Prize for Best French Film of 2000 by the...

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA Industry, Policy, Identity.
September 22, 2001... Receiving his award for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars in 1982, the writer of Chariots of Fire, Colin Welland, famously declared, "The British are coming." Given the up-and-down history of British filmmaking, he should, of course, have...

PROJECTING A 'NEW BRITAIN'.
September 22, 2001... Immediately before and after the 1997 landslide election of Tony Blair's 'New Labour' Government in Britain after eighteen years of Conservative rule--under Margaret Thatcher and, from 1992, John Major--there was much talk of a 'New Britain'...

BRITAIN'S FUNK SOUL BROTHERS: Gender, Family and Nation in the New Brit-Pics.
September 22, 2001... The weekend has landed. All that exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties. I've got forty-eight hours off from the world., .I'm going to Never-Never Land with my chosen family, man." The words belong to Jip (John Simm), Justin Kerrigan's...

From Private Gardens to Utopian Moments.(contemporary British cinema)
September 22, 2001... Colin Sorensen, in London on Film: 100 years of Film-Making in London (1996), suggests that London is such an important element in British film-making that it is possible to speak of 'Londons,' just as one might refer to 'Westerns.' I don't...

NORTHERN REALISM An Exhausted Tradition?(British cinema)
September 22, 2001... Two of the most noted British films in the last five years have been The Full Monty (Peter Cattanco, 1997) and Billy Elliot (Stephen Dairy, 2000). Both were commercially successful domestically and internationally, and have garnered a fair...

CHALLENGING COLONIAL TRADITIONS British Cinema in the Celtic Fringe.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... One of British cinema's more engaging releases of 2001 is Saul Metzstein's feature-film debut Late Night Shopping, an understated look at contemporary urban angst and the problems of today's disaffected and disengaged twentysomethings. The film...

DEVOLVING BRITISH CINEMA: The New Scottish Cinema and the European Art Film.
September 22, 2001... One of the most interesting and significant developments in British filmmaking in the 1990s was the emergence of a distinctive cinema in Scotland. Spearheaded by a number of high-profile low-budget productions including Shallow Grave (Danny...

'ANOTHER KIND OF BRITISH': An Exploration of British Asian Films.
September 22, 2001... What is British-Asian film? Just as lumping together filmmakers of any kind within a single cultural grouping is fraught with difficulty, so the term 'British Asian' may fail to recognize individual artistic voices, such as those of...

Babymother.(motion picture)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Babymother is a reggae musical cat shot in the Scone-bridge estate in Harlesden, West London, featuring a young black ease. It was written and directed by Julian Henriques, produced by Parminder Vir and funded by FilmFour. It was released in...

SHORT SIGHTED: Short Filmmaking in Britain.
September 22, 2001... In their reporting of Cannes 2001, the British media were united in bemoaning the lack of a British presence at the festival and a number of scapegoats were wheeled out--the recently formed U.K. Film Council, the poor quality of...

BRITISH CINEMA QUESTIONNAIRE.
September 22, 2001... Cineaste sent the following four questions to a select list of British filmmakers, film Critics, and other film-industry professionals: 1) What is your view of the current state of British cinema?; 2) Is it still meaningful to talk about...

The Politics of Pure Emotion.(interview with filmmaker Tran Anh Hung)(Interview)
September 22, 2001... An Interview with Tran Anh Hung Tran Anh Hung was thirteen years old when his family left Vietnam for Paris around the time of the 1975 communist victory in that nation's long civil war. In France he studied film production and made his...

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Produced by Bill Kong, Hsu Li Kong and Ang Lee; directed by Ang Lee; written by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, based on the novel by Wang Du Lu; cinematography by Peter Pau; production and costume design by Tim Yip; edited by...

Terrorists in Retirement.(documentary film)
September 22, 2001... Directed by Mosco Boucault; cinematography by Jean Orjollet and Philippe Rousselot; sound by Michel Kharat; edited by Christiane Leherissey; music by Jean Schwarz; narrated by Simone Signoret and Gerard Desarthe. Color. French dialog with...

A Love Divided.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Produced by Alan Maloney, Tim Palmer and Gerry Gregg; directed by Syd Macartney; screenplay by Stuart Hepburn; cinematography by Cedric Culliton; edited by Ray Roantree; production design by Alan Farquharson; costume design by Allison Byrne;...

Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Produced and directed by Stanley Nelson; written by Marcia Smith; edited by Lewis Erskine; cinematography by Robert Shepard and Arthur Jafa Fielder; music by Kysia Bostic and J. J. McGeehan; narrated by Carl Lumbly. Color and B&W, 90 mins....

DVD COMMENTARY TRACKS: LISTENING TO THE AUTEURS.
September 22, 2001... Once happy to marvel at a big screen, then to watch on television, next to control the means of fast forward and freeze frame via videotape, cinephiles now demand more than mere flickering imagery. As only low-tech Luddites still clinging to...

La Guerre est finie.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Directed by Alain Resnais; cinematography by Sacha Vierny; screenplay by Jorge Semprun. DVD, B&W, 116 mins., French dialog with English subtitles. Starring Yves Montand, Genevieve Bujold, Ingrid Thulin, Michel Piccoli and Jean Daste....

Mon Oncle.(Adrienne Servantie)(Review)
September 22, 2001... Directed by Jacques Tati; starring Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie, and Alain Bercourt. DVD, color, 116 mins., French dialog with English subtitles. Distributed by The Criterion Collection. Excluding Parade (1973), the...

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Directed, written, edited and cinematography by Chris Marker; VHS, color, 55 mins. Narration in English; Russian (and other) dialog with English subtitles. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, Brooklyn, New York 11201, phone...

A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left.(Review)
September 22, 2001... by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.275 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50. Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted at the very moment when he seemed to be developing into a major artist, was...

Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema.(Review)
September 22, 2001... by Lucy Mazdon. London: British Film Institute, 2000; distributed by Indiana University Press. 169 pp., illus. Hardcover: $59.95 and Paperback: $19.95. The purchase of Universal Pictures by the French media giant Vivendi inspired a...

Searching For John Ford.(Review)
September 22, 2001... by Joseph McBride. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. 838 pp., illus, Hardcover: $40.00 Only sixty pages longer than his other lengthy biography, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992), Joseph McBride's Searching For John Ford is,...

Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux.(Review)
September 22, 2001... by J. Ronald Green.Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. 316 pp., illus, Hardcover:$29.95. Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884 in Illinois to freed slaves, and died in 1951, of hypertension, while promoting his books...

Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See.(Review)
September 22, 2001... by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Chicago: A Capella Books. 2000. 234 pp. Hardcover: $24.00. The title says it all. It's Jonathan Rosenbaum's contentious premise in his latest book that 'they' are working tirelessly to prevent 'us' from enjoying the...

LETTERS.
September 22, 2001... Your Critic Is an Avowed Enemy of My Book I was dismayed by John Hill's review of The Films of Mike Leigh (Cineaste, Vol. XXVI, No. 2), both for what it told me about Cineaste's editorial process and what it told me about the reviewer. The...

Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the Revolution.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Jamsheed Akrami's interview/excerpt documentary goes a long way in offering exposition into one of the most discussed back stories in recent international cinema: the surprising ascendancy of Iranian film to the preeminent position it currently...

Hidden Wars of Desert Storm.(Review)
September 22, 2001... The August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's forces sparked the largest international crisis since the breakup of the Soviet Union, with Western regiments reciprocating in an all-out offensive whose air raids wreaked destruction...

Once Upon a Time in China.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Ten years on, Hong Kong auteur Tsui Hark's sweeping martial-arts epic (restored in a new print) still stirs with emotion, metaphor, and relevance, aging as gracefully as its star, Jet Li. Set in the early 1800s, the film is primarily concerned...

Sisters in Resistance.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Maia Wechuler's Sisters in Resistance strikingly demonstrates that one can make an emotionally stirring documentary using the most minimal of cinematic means. The film consists of four eloquent, elderly French women talking to the director and...

Unfinished Symphony.(Review)
September 22, 2001... This fine film depicts the ideological atmosphere that gave rise to the GI antiwar movement, and specifically to its most important organization, the Vietnam Veterans against the War. Documentary footage of American firepower and of brutal...