Cineaste articles from September 2006

Cineaste archives from September 2006

Focusing on the art and craft of acting.(Editorial)
September 22, 2006... In a recent Newsweek interview, up-and-coming, twenty-something actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, Brick) bristled when referred to as a "celebrity." "No, sir. I'm an actor," he replied, going on to explain that the myth of celebrity...

Through a door darkly: a reappraisal of John Ford's The Searchers.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers is among the most canonized works of film history, frequently placed near Citizen Kane, Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, and other celebrated works on the top ten lists of international film critics. It is...

Val Lewton at RKO: the social dimensions of horror.(RKO Pictures Inc.)
September 22, 2006... Val Lewton's troubled career at RKO is tellingly illuminated by the following anecdote. Lewton, about to produce Isle of the Dead (1945), was summoned to a meeting with his supervisor, lack Gross, and a cog in the RKO public relations machine...

Love hurts: performance in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass.(Acting in the Cinema)
September 22, 2006... "I don't give a shit whether you've gone to The Actors Studio all your life, if it's going to be a really truthful moment, it's going to be painful, or it isn't the truth." --Bob Rafelson (1) As someone who came to academia from training...

The star is the story: an interview with Joan Allen.(Interview)
September 22, 2006... When loan Allen appears on-screen, she always delivers a charge--an energy percolating beneath a subdued and understated surface. Her performances often quietly liberate script and story from lapses into the prescribed or the predictable. In...

The actor's voice.
September 22, 2006... Actors with low voices are one of the most entrancing things in film. They are excellent in thrillers, because of the instant depth and charge they give to a movie. They are compelling in action, since they carry an inbuilt sense of control,...

What is 'great' acting?
September 22, 2006... "Robert De Niro Greatest Living Movie Star" was the headline of a 2004 poll for the British film magazine Empire, ranking the world's greatest actors "over the age of 50." The results travelled the Internet and appeared in newspapers around the...

I'll Be in My Trailer: Creative Wars Between Directors and Actors.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... I'll Be in My Trailer: Creative Wars Between Directors & Actors by John Badham and Craig Modderno. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2006. 217 pp., illus. Paperback: $26.95. This unassuming exploration of the relationship between...

The great pretender: an interview with Willem Dafoe.(Interview)
September 22, 2006... Like such disparate film actors as Dustin Hoffman, Michael Caine, and lack Lemmon, Willem Dafoe traverses traditional boundaries separating 'movie stars' and 'character actors.' Lemmon, Caine, and Hoffman found their way to Hollywood via...

Performances in Adaptation: analyzing human movement in motion pictures.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... Close study of essentially any screen performance will show that performance elements are as integral to a film as its framing and editing selections. Examining film performances that require actors to address particular challenges--performing...

The art of casting: interviews with Ellen Lewis, Avy Kaufman and Craig Campobasso.(Interview)
September 22, 2006... Casting directors, who interview, audition, and select the actors who are then seen by directors and producers, may have the most undercredited and invisible job in the entire process of assembling a film. The work of casting directors requires...

Acting in the cinema: commentary by authors and critics.
September 22, 2006... In order to offer additional informed insights and critical commentary on key issues involved in our "Acting in the Cinema" supplement, we invited the contributions of several authors and critics specializing in film performance. We asked them...

The transparency of things: an interview with Richard Linklater.(Interview)
September 22, 2006... Richard Linklater has been successfully working in independent and commercial film since his 1991 film, Slacker. Often blurring the distinction between the filmmaking styles, apparatuses and esthetics of independent and commercial filmmaking,...

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Bill Kong, Xiu Jian, and Zhang Weiping; directed by Zhang Yimou; screenplay by Zou Jingzhi, based on a story by Zhang Yimou, Zou Jingzhi, and Wang Bin; cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding; production design by Sun Li; costumes...

Army of Shadows.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Jacques Dorfmann; directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel; cinematography by Pierre Lhomme; art direction by Theobald Meurisse; edited by Francoise Bonnot; music...

The Notorious Bettie Page.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Lori Keith Douglas, Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel, Christine Vachon, and John Wells; directed by Mary Harron; screenplay by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner; cinematography by Mott Hupfel; edited by Tricia Cooke; music by Joseph S....

United 93.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Lloyd Levin; written and directed by Paul Greengrass; cinematography by Barry Ackroyd; edited by Claire Douglas, Richard Pearson, and Christopher Rouse; production design by Dominic Watkins; art...

A Scanner Darkly.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Tommy Pallotta, Jonah Smith, Erwin Stoff, Ann Walker-McBay, and Palmer West; written and directed by Richard Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick; cinematography by Shane F. Kelly; head of animation, Bob Sabiston; edited...

Volver.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Agustin Almodovar and Esther Garcia; written and directed by Pedro Almodovar; cinematography by Jose Luis Alcaine; production design by Salvador Parra; edited by Jose Salcedo; original music by Alberto Iglesias; starring Penelope...

A nos amours.(Video recording review)
September 22, 2006... Directed by Maurice Piaiat; screenplay by Maurice Pialat; starring Maurice Pialat and Sandrine Bonnaire. DVD, color, 99 rains., 1983. Double-disc special edition also includes The Human Eye, directed by Xavier Giannoli. Color, 55 mins., 1999. A...

Winter Soldier.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Produced by Wintersoldier Collective and Milliarium Zero: Fred Aranow, Nancy Baker, Joe Bangert, Rhetta Barron, Robert Fiore, David Gillis, Jeff Holstein, Barbarba Jarvis, AI Kaupas, Barbara Kopple, Mark Lenix, Michael Lesser, Lee Osborne, Lucy...

Viridiana.(Video recording review)
September 22, 2006... Directed by Luis Bunuel; written by Bunuel and Julio Alejandro; produced by Pedro Portabella and R. Munoz Suay (Spain) and Gustavo Alatriste (Mexico); cinematography by Jose F. Aguayo; edited by Pedro del Rey; art direction by Francisco Canet;...

Network.(Video recording review)
September 22, 2006... Directed by Sidney Lumet; written by Paddy Chayefsky; starring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, and Ned Beatty. Two-disc DVD set, color, 121 mins. 1976. A Warner Home Video release. More than once in this DVD's...

Blood and Wine.(Video recording review)
September 22, 2006... Directed by Bob Rafelson; story by Rafelson and Nick Villiers; screenplay by Nick Villiers and Alison Cross; cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel; starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, Stephen Dorff, Jennifer Lopez and Judy Davis. DVD,...

Orson Welles: Hello Americans, vol. 2.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow. New York: Viking Adult, 2006. 528 pp., illus. Hardcover: $32.95. "It seems to me there is a plain, if many-layered, truth to be told," Simon Callow writes in his Preface to the second...

American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now Edited by Phillip Lopate. New York: The Library of America, 2006. 720 pp. Hardcover: $40.00. In 1971, during a remarkable and now long-lost era when prominent movie critics...

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 by Zhang Zhen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 456 pp., illus. Paperback: $30.00. The Shanghai city tourist office has recently published a leaflet entitled...

The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood by Alison McMahan, New York and London: Continuum 2005. 262 pp., illus. Hardcover: $85.00. Paperback: $21.95. I bet you didn't know that the last time you walked out...

Dogville Vs. Hollywood.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Dogville vs. Hollywood. by Jake Horsley. London: Marion Boyars. (Distributed in the United States by Consortium Books). 2005. 352pp. Paperback: $17,95. Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003) is, despite its winking aspirations to minimalism, one...

A second look: Tarkovsky and Feminism: a second look at Nostalghia.(Andrei Tarkovsky)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... Most people don't look for men and women in Andrei Tarkovsky's films; they look for allegories and symbols despite Tarkovsky's repeated insistence that his work contains neither of these. (1) Because it has been widely agreed upon that...

The Cannes Film Festival.
September 22, 2006... One balmy evening, at the beginning of the 2006 incarnation of the Cannes Film Festival, I walked past a beaming, tuxedoed Ken Loach in an unusually festive mood. Loach would soon win the Palme d'or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, his...

The Istanbul International Film Festival.
September 22, 2006... Istiklal Caddesi is not the Croisette, but there was a pronounced French accent to the Istanbul Festival for its twenty-fifth year. Istiklal Caddesi, in the commercially and culturally rich Beyoglu district, is the broad and long pedestrian way...

America: From Freedom to Fascism.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... The success of Michael Moore's engaging first-person political documentaries virtually guaranteed imitators. Enter Aaron Russo, Hollywood producer turned libertarian politician (he has run for President and Governor of Nevada). Russo's "quest"...

The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... In 2002, the National Security Agency revealed that messages intercepted on September 10th, 2001 hinted at the impending World Trade Center attacks, but went unnoticed due to the huge backlog of material waiting to be translated and analyzed....

4.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... The term chernukha, which derives from the Russian for "black," but shouldn't be confused with film noir, applies to the late-Soviet and post-Soviet film genre dwelling on the more dismal sides of reality. And things can't get much bleaker...

Giuliani Time.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... Those who hate the authoritarian, larger than life Rudy Giuliani usually do so with such blind ferocity that they have difficulty admitting that he ever effected positive changes in governing New York City. Giuliani may have had few answers to...

Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria.(Movie review)
September 22, 2006... It's difficult to describe the drag queen-led, queer revolt that took place in San Francisco's Tenderloin district in 1966 without placing the incident in immediate context to the well-mythologized Stonewall riots that would take place in New...