bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Toronto 2007
Authors: Wee Brandon
Published: August 2019

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2007 With a festival as big as Toronto's, pinning down a general theme about its line-up each year would seem to defy its promise of something-for-everyone, as this year's slate of 349 films from 55 countries showed. Although larger media outlets named discernible themes among the festival's subsections anyway - "frustrated youth" for one; "war in Iraq and global terrorism" for another, the most engaging films this year were apt to be foremost of all, engaging and well-told stories. Here are ten examples: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania 2007)The waning period of the Ceausescu regime sets the stage for a young woman's labours to arrange a back-alley abortion for her college roommate. Although the illegality of the undertaking furnishes much of the plot's intrigue, the film's gravitas owes much to Mungiu's calibrated direction, which eschews reactionary...
Late Ozu DVD Collection
Authors: Uhde Jan
Published: August 2019

YASUJIRO OZU needs neither introduction nor recommendation. Many of Ozu's features have been available on DVD for some time in Asia but mostly only on Region 3 which the great majority of DVD players in the West would not play. There has been only little Ozu available in the West so this Criteron release is good news. The Eclipse series presents the director's work of the last decade of his life - a mature artist who has honed his restrained style. It also shows Ozu experimenting with colour and revealing more of his subtle, understated humour, as in The End of Summer and Late Autumn....
57th Berlinale 2007
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

EUROPEAN Film MarketNow in his sixth year as director of the Berlin International Film Festival, Dieter Kosslick takes particular pride in changing the image of the festival each time around. This year, for the 57th Berlinale (8-18 February 2007), he expanded the European Film Market (EFM) beyond the environs of the roomy Martin Gropius Bau, a short three-minute walk from festival headquarters on the Potsdamer Platz. "Last year, we offered buyers and sellers 5000 square metres of space in the Gropius Bau," he said in an interview, "but this year every nook and cranny of the building couldn't accommodate all of the market professionals who requested stands." So, to handle the overflow, the fifth floor of the Berlinale Service Center in the Debis atrium was reserved for latecomers. Altogether, more than 5000 market professionals were accredited for the Berlinale, while over 250 films from 51 countries were programmed...
Interview with Ron Holloway
Authors: Neunzerling Felix
Published: August 2019

INTERVIEW WITH RON HOLLOWAY ON OCCASION OF HIS BERLINALE CAMERA AWARD 2007 ZOOM: Your career as a film journalist is directly connected to international festivals. How long have you been associated with the Berlinale? My first visit to the Berlinale was in 1965.At the time I will spending a summer at the Cinémathèque Française, "pirating" rare film prints from New York distributors to Henri Langlois for his archive. Langlois gave me a courtesy pass to all Cinémathèque screening. One day, Lotte Eisner at the Cinémathèque suggested that I visit the Berlinale and see what the young German filmmakers were up to. So I took an Air France flight to Tegel, at that time a barn instead of a terminal, and spent a week at the Zoo Palast as an accredited journalist for Film Society Review in New York. When did you visit the Berlinale together...
The Little Cinema of Malaysia
Authors: Muthalib Hassan Abd
Published: August 2019

THE LITTLE CINEMA OF MALAYSIA: OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW MALAYSIAN mainstream cinema is notable (!) for its emphasis on pure entertainment and nothing but. The films were also notable (until recently), for not reflecting the ethnic and cultural diversity of Malaysia in spite of the official promotion of the country internationally as Malaysia, Truly Asia. Dishing out cliched, stereotypical and antiquated narratives and characters, many of these films somehow attain box-office success, proof that they are popular with a certain segment of the cinema-going public. None of these films, however, have been invited to participate in international film festivals. The few alternative films that have surfaced from time to time (and have had international exposure), have never had a mass audience, and them have ever made back their initial investment. This gloomy scenario, however, has not fazed the group dubbed The Little Cinema of Malaysia....
The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-Apocalyptic Franchise
Authors: Stewart Kevin
Published: August 2019

THE ZOMBIE AESTHETICS AND THE POST-APOCALYPTIC FRANCHISEON MARCH 22nd 1996, Japanese video game company Capcom Inc. released Biohazard, the first of their new immersive zombie survival-horror role playing games (RPGs) for the Sony PlayStation. Released in the West as Resident Evil, George A. Romero's model of the animated cadaver and Lucio Fulci's command of the atmospheric combined to provide the main inspiration for the game's visual and narrative aesthetic (Poole, 79): a complete and immersive reworking of the zombie genre by Tokyo based video game producer Shinji Mikami. Although not the first video game franchise to attain cult recognition or make a successful transfer to the big screen - Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise come to mind - a determination, "to repackage the zombie as a mainstream monster and an icon of cool" (Russell, 171) clearly paid off: The Resident Evil games had succeeded...
Malayalam Cinema from Politics to Poetics
Authors: Dönmez-Colin Gönül
Published: August 2019

MALAYALAM CINEMA FROM POLITICS TO POETICSINDIA IS the leading producer of films in the world with over 1000 films per year. The tiny south-western state of Kerala where a language called Malayalam is spoken has surpassed West Bengal as a major centre of art films. Its most important filmmaker, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is hailed as the living Satyajit Ray. Since the beginning of the 1970s, with the strong film society movement supported by the literary traditions of the state, Malayalam cinema has excelled in politically engagé films with artistic inclinations. When the Golden Age of Tamil and Telugu movies ended, Kannada and Malayalam cinemas came to the fore. Although, they too had their share of stars, the director came to be recognized as the most important person behind a film. The "new cinema" distinguished itself from the outset for its thematic excellence. Even the mediocre films initiated by...
Report on Canadian Film Archives
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

INTERNATIONALLY, there are Archives, Archives, Archives, from Film to TV - but where to put them and what to keep? Canada makes some progress. At almost every film festival, internationally, when early print of a classic turns up, the question permanently asked is where did that print come from? And the answer is usually from such and such an Archive in some part of the world. For Canadians, the Archive was a seldom visited place in Ottawa, where somewhere films in dented cans or broken boxes, hardly separated from papers, journals, and material having little to do with movies. In spite of the clamour from film enthusiasts, the federal government remained unmoved, while the staff, without temperature control, tried to keep them from becoming dead reels. Now, after years of pleading and asking the Dominion Government has finally built an astonishing film archive across the river from Ottawa in...
Leipzig 2007
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

49th LEIPZIG INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FOR DOCUMENTARY AND ANIMATION FILMS Under visionary Claas Danielson, now in his third year as festival director and aided by an equally energetic team, the 49th Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animation Films (30 October- 05 November 2006), aka Dok Festival & Dok Industry for visiting professionals, broke its previous statistical record once more. From 2,400 submissions, the festival booked just over 400 films from 50 countries, the total evenly divided between documentary and animation entries. Altogether, that amounts to 19,230 minutes viewing time, or 13 days, 8 hours, and 30 minutes in one sitting. This year's attendance climbed to 22,500, up from 20,000 in 2005. A total of Euro 53,500 was handed out to award winners in various categories. Among the 259 events (including social events, reruns, and industry specials) was one key day that signalled a new direction for the festival. On...
Autobiographic Discourse in the Films of Jerzy Skolimowski
Authors: Mazierska Ewa
Published: August 2019

FROM PARTICIPANT TO OBSERVER: AUTOBIOGRAPHIC DISCOURSE IN THE FILMS OF JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI IN his native Poland Jerzy Skolimowski is regarded as an artist who conveyed his life and persona on screen more effectively than any other Polish filmmaker: the ultimate autobiographer in and for Polish cinema. This paper attempts to establish how Skolimowski managed to convince his viewers that his films are about him, and how his self-portrait evolved over the years. Before I move to discussing Skolimowski's films and his life, it is worth briefly presenting the concept of autobiography I will use here. Following authors such as Roy Pascal, Jerome Hamilton Buckley and Philippe Lejeune, from the times he revised his notion of autobiographical pact, I regard autobiography not so much as a matter of truthful representation of one's persona and life but of the impression effected by the autobiographer on his reader (see Pascal 1960; Buckley...
The Role of the Unconscious in Marnie and Three Colours: Blue
Authors: Johnson Veronica
Published: August 2019

THE ROLE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN MARNIE AND THREE COLOURS: BLUE The unconscious completely eludes that circle of certainties by which man recognises himself as ego. There is something outside this field which has every right to speak as I, and which makes this right manifest by coming into the world speaking as an I. It is precisely what is most misconstrued by the domain of the ego which, in analysis, comes to be formulated as properly speaking being the I.Jacques Lacan(1) Film excels at documenting the life of the ego. It is a medium which depends on the portrayal of the conscious actions of the protagonists for its appeal. The narrative of a film is unfolded through these actions. Anything which is "outside this field" of conscious action is more difficult to capture on film; thought processes, imaginings, dreams and wishes present filmmakers with...
The Bon, the Bad and the Others
Authors: Stojanova Christina
Published: August 2019

The Bon, the Bad and the Others: Some Remarks on the Phenomenal Success of Bon Cop, Bad Cop in Quebec This article discusses some aspects of the phenomenal box-office success in Quebec of Bon Cop, Bad Cop directed by Eric Canuel, released in 2006. Let me first refer to some statistics: within nine weeks or so from its release in early August of 2006, Bon Cop, Bad Cop was a few thousand dollars short of equalling the box-office success of Porky's, the all-time Canadian box office success from the early 1980s, a raunchy Florida-set sex-comedy that made 11.2 million in Canada. Ninety percent of the box-office, however, came from the home province ticket sales of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, leaving far behind such recent viewers' darlings as Les Boys from 1997, La grande seduction and Les invasions barbares, both from 2003 and above all, Seraphin, the historical drama from...
Cinema in Post-Taliban Afghanistan
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

CINEMA IN POST-TALIBAN AFGHANISTAN Bamyan BuddhasWhen the giant Buddhas on the Silk Road at Bamyan were destroyed by radical Taliban clerics in March of 2001 in accordance with a strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, even the Afghan populace was stunned by the disrespect for their own cultural heritage. For in July of 1999 the leading Sharia cleric, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had issued an order for the preservation of the Bamyan Buddhas on the grounds that the Afghanistan Buddhist population scarcely existed, thus removing the possibility of the statues being worshipped. But when 400 radical Taliban clerics launched a ban on all forms of imagery - including music, sports, and television - they reached a questionable consensus that the statues were an affront to Islam. So Mullah Mohammed Omar changed his mind. "Muslims should be proud of smashing idols," he said. "It has given praise to God that...
Film, Arts and Culture as Community Outreach Tools
Authors: Yu Victor S. O.
Published: August 2019

FILM, ARTS AND CULTURE AS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TOOLS: PERSPECTIVES FROM SINGAPOREIntroductionSingapore’s vision of nationhood involves a sense of shared destiny based on multiculturalism. It cultural and creative vibrancy can be seen in terms of economic, political and social conditions governing the production and distribution of expression. Much coordinated efforts among government, businesses, filmmakers and arts leaders have taken place to ensure the arts and culture industry is creating significant economic benefits to the country. Every major city in the Asia Pacific region is in the race for talent, competitiveness and economic success. In many of these cities, film, arts and culture is playing a central role in economic development and community life. It is essential to integrate film, arts and culture into Singapore’s economic development initiatives and increase the vibrancy of and financial resources for its film, arts and cultural sectors. Singapore has often...
Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires
Authors: Sanna Antonio
Published: August 2019

REPRODUCING THE FIN-DE-SIECLE GOTHIC WITH TECHNO-GOTHIC VAMPIRES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ALIEN QUADRILOGY AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA'S EXILE AbstractMany critics have agreed on defining both the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker and the Alien series as horror narratives, with specific reference to the latter as a form of contemporary Gothic. Indeed, several collections of critical essays and scholarly volumes on the Gothic analyse both the work of Dracula and the Alien films. In this article, I intend to examine the similarities between Stoker's 1897 work and the four films of Alien, produced between 1979 and 1998. Specifically, I will examine the characteristics of the 1890s Gothic and refer them to the Alien films. These works can be associated to each other by comparing the scholarly work by the critics and particularly their focus on the sexual metaphors and contents present in these texts. Certainly, innumerable literary and...
Hong Kong and Singapore 1997
Authors: Toh Hai Leong
Published: August 2019

THE PRESTIGIOUS 21st HONG KONG International Film Festival, which concluded on 9 April 1997, presented its largest and perhaps the greatest collection of global cinema with some 280 films and video works. This year, this non-competitive festival attracted more than three hundred festival guests and major critics from all over the world with more than half of them coming from Japan and East Asia.  Its humbler counterpart, the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) is now in its 10th year. Some 220 films were shown there (including a number of fringe films and videos presented at the Goethe Institute, and a retrospective of François Truffaut's films screened at the Alliance Française). Film critics and festival directors flew over to the Republic to view the sensitive selection of Asian cinema by the festival programmer Philip Cheah. In its competitive section for Asian films, the SIFF honours the winners with its Silver...
Report on East-Asian Cinema
Authors: Toh Hai Leong
Published: August 2019

EMERGING TRENDS: A PERSONAL VIEW From Singapore three out of four of its cinematic efforts produced in the last two years were shown in Penang's First East Asian Film and Television Festival held in Pulau Pinang (Malaysia) from 27th August to 3rd September 1997. These were Lim Suat Yen's The Road Less Travelled, Eric Khoo's 12 Storeys and Ong Keng Sen's Army Daze. The film not included was the sensationalistic Dog or God by Hugo Ng. Singapore's film history of only two years makes it still too early to observe any emerging trend in terms of themes or preoccupations, much less trends that are likely to influence other filmmakers. Nevertheless, the island-state, better known for its clean, efficient and scrupulous government, is proud to have produced four features to date. A horrendous attempt at filmmaking was first made by beauty pageant promoter Errol Pang in 1991. Going by the...
Penang (Malaysia) 1997
Authors: Uhde Jan
Published: August 2019

PENANG'S 1st EAST ASIA FILM AND TELEVISION FESTIVAL LIKE the Hong Kong film industry, Iran has already had fifty years of filmmaking, amounting to the production of 1,200 films in that time. Few national cinemas have had to go through the changes and pressures that Iranian filmmaking has been subjected to from the Shah era of the 1970s to the tumultuous revolutionary days of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the recent creative years. In fact as early as 1989, the Hong Kong International Film Festival was showing Iranian features like Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Peddlar and Dariush Farhang's The Spell. Despite their difficulties, Iranian filmmakers have tenaciously held on to their art. This year, with much persistence, they have shown to the world that their cinema is more than children's films or propaganda. Even before Abbas Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherry (Ta'm-e Gilass) shared this May's Cannes Palme d'Or with The...
The Proliferation of the Short Subject
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

The Proliferation of the Short Subject (Toronto International Short Film Festival)Short films -- we hear so much about them; but what is a short film, or video, these days, and where do they find their audience? In the beginning everything shot was short -- one minute long because that was all the cameras of the time could accommodate. When this technical difficulty was overcome a short became the length of one reel running ten minutes. When projectors were made to take longer reels when sound came in two tens were joined together and a short became twenty minutes. The running time of most silent films was seldom given in hours and minutes. An hour film would be six reels -- of ten minutes each, but being projected by hand, as all silent films were, they could run a bit shorter or longer, depending on how quickly or slowly the projectionist...
Canadian Cinema
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

CANADIAN CINEMA: A SUMMING UP OF THE YEAR IN REVIEW SEPTEMBER is the month when new Canadian films appear and we discover what's been going on in the underworld of feature film production. They arrive at the Montréal, Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver festivals and the nomination screenings for the Genie Awards. Except for the Montréal festival's catalogue, which is content to simply summarise the stories of the films being shown, the rest would have us believe that all their entries, Canadian, in particular, are of the most profound importance, skilful, aware and socially, politically and sexually significant! Expectations aroused by these endorsements are seldom fulfilled, and where our films are concerned much is made of "first features" with one overly-excited programmer telling us "that there are more first-time directors than ever before" forgetting that every year we have first directors by the score who, fortunately in most cases, are...
Czech Film After 1989
Authors: Voráč Jiří
Published: August 2019

CZECH FILM AFTER 1989: THE WAVE OF THE YOUNG NEWCOMERS THE history of Czech cinema has been frequently marked and stigmatized, more than the non- industrial and more individual art disciplines, by large historical social upheavals which the Czech lands experienced in this century. During its hundred-year-long history, the Czech film survived five different social systems. Its origins (the first films on the Czech soil were presented by Jan Kříženecký in 1898) are rooted in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, it continued its development in a free and democratic Czechoslovak Republic which was after two decades destroyed by the Nazi Germany. A fundamental systemic change occurred in 1945 when the Czechoslovak film was nationalized i.e., that the state (and after 1948 the Communist establishment) completely controlled all film activities in the entire country.(1) After the demise of the Communist dictatorship in...
Lost in Transit
Authors: Uhde Jan
Published: August 2019

A TORTUOUS PATH: FROM THE FILMMAKER TO THE VIEWER MOST discussions and writings on the subject of motion pictures, including those scrutinizing film's structural characteristics, aesthetic qualities, and effects on the audience, have traditionally referred to the film work in a relatively abstract sense, i.e. without considering the actual state of the film print as projected. Their authors tacitly imply the existence of the "perfect print" -- a complete and authorised version presented to the viewer in an immaculate state without distortions, as if just released from the studio's laboratory, released without delay and screened on an adequate projection equipment in an equally appropriate environment. Film is generally understood as a recorded medium which allows each print to be repeatedly screened, thus generating a series of identical performances; this inherent quality makes movies different, for example, from the stage play or a musical interpretation where every single performance is...
The Most Poetic Subject in the World
Authors: Wee Valerie Su-Lin
Published: August 2019

THE MOST POETIC SUBJECT IN THE WORLD: OBSERVATIONS ON DEATH, (BEAUTIFUL) WOMEN AND REPRESENTATION IN BLADE RUNNER WESTERN culture has a long tradition of associating death with femininity and sex. Whether it is Snow White or Bluebeard's wives, Clarissa or Madame Bovary, Carmen or Madame Butterfly, representations of dead and dying women fascinate and disturb. A Greek motto from Palladas states that "Every woman is as bitter as gall; but she has two good moments, one in bed, the other at her death" (quoted by Mérimée, 181). According to Edgar Allan Poe, "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic subject in the world" (19). Thomas de Quincey acknowledges ". . . with the love that burns in depths of admiration . . . that you [sister woman] can do one thing as well as the best of us men -- a greater thing than even...
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Art of Film
Authors: Miczka Tadeusz
Published: August 2019

"WE LIVE IN THE WORLD LACKING IDEA ON ITSELF: KRZYSZTOF KIEŚLOWSKI's ART OF FILM" OUR "little stabilization" -- this ironic phrase by Tadeusz Różewicz, the poet and playwright, rightly characterized the low living standards of Poles and the state of apathy of the society in the 1960s. It also reflected well the situation of the Polish culture which, at that time, was put under strong political pressure and, except for very few instances, half- truths and newspeak replaced the clear dichotomy of truth and falsity. However, it finds its strongest expression if seen against the background of the Polish cinema of that time, since the cinema was, so to say, the "light in the eyes" of the Workers' Party activists devoutly building the 'real socialism' state. After the period of the political thaw which, among other things, brought to life artistically courageous works of the 'Polish film school', the...
Banff 1996
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

THE DOMINANT PERSONALITIES at the 17th Banff TV Festival this year were, not surprisingly, British and American: Melvyn Bragg of the South Bank Show and Steven Bochco, writer and producer; the credits of these two creative celebrities hardly need repeating here. The most impressive presence, in numbers and intelligence, was the delegation from Boston's WGBH, the station chosen by the Festival to receive its Outstanding Achievement Award. With President and General Manager, Henry Becton Jr.; Vice-President for National Programming, Peter McGhee; and Vice-President for Special Telecommunications Services, Brigid Sullivan; and their associates including Rebecca Eaton, producer of Mystery and Masterpiece Theatre, here was a group of broadcasters dedicated to the principles of Public Broadcasting and fighting determinedly to maintain their place on U.S. television screens despite the reduction in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. "When we say" remarked Henry Becton, "that if PBS doesn't show most...
Ottawa 1996
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

IN OTTAWA, ONE WEEK LATER, came the Summer Institute of Screen Writing, now in its sixteenth year, and where, on its opening night we heard that its enthusiastic and determined founder, Tom Shoebridge, has decided to move upstairs to the position of Chairman bringing in Tim O'Brien to be the programmer. This event is not so much a festival as a work place forum where the paying participants are introduced to the "intensive, focused, career-boosting" workshops and where, in just five days "you will realize your highest potential" in screen writing and direction. As introductions to crafts and careers however, with descriptions of methods to follow and moves to make, they are revealing and valuable. Few leave without feeling that they have trodden at last the paths to discovery. Among those leading the way were Sandy Wilson, Gerald Wexler, Anna Sandor, Nancy Trites Bodkin, Bill Gough, Tantoo Cardinal, Murray...
Lost Girls, Dead Poets, Last Waves
Authors: Cossa Frank
Published: August 2019

The Australian film director Peter Weir has created, over the last twenty years, a body of work of remarkable quality and consistency of vision. In virtually all of his films something -- often quite literally someone -- gets lost. Innocence, idealism, and faith are the usual casualties. Moreover, there is nearly always a clash of cultures. His characters are thrown into a milieu they are not equipped to understand, one that seems hostile and threatening if only for its strangeness. In this, Weir is the quintessential Aussie; the perennial outsider. Australians are neither European, nor Asian, nor South Sea Islanders, yet they are all of these. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) takes place on St. Valentine's Day, 1900, at a girls' school in Southeast Australia, a Victorian outpost on the edge of the bush. In the atmosphere of hothouse romanticism that pervades the place the girls exchange valentines and love...
New Russian Cinema
Authors: Stojanova Christina
Published: August 2019

The transition to market economy and the dismantling of the USSR created an unprecedented crisis in Russian film industry. The awesome All Union Ministry of Cinematography (Goskino) was dismembered. This almost paramilitary institution, whose senior officials were also allegedly senior KGB officers, directed, or rather policed, the Soviet film production process with the stick of censorship, and the carrot of lucrative awards. Understandably, the censorship is not going to be sorely missed. What is missed, however, are the generous state budgets and the firm general line, drawn by the military from the Ministry, in accordance with the ever-changing Kremlin ideological vision. Distribution-wise the situation in Russian cinema followed the pattern characteristic for the other post-communist countries. American films, kept for so long beyond the ideological pale, took over the repertoire, occupying around 75% of the programming time, with a tendency to reach 85% during the next decade. In the Russian...
Schwarzkopf in 'Nam
Authors: Sutton David
Published: August 2019

During the summer of 1993, CBS News aired an hour-long television special program entitled Schwarzkopf in Vietnam: A Soldier Returns. This program, hereafter referred to as SVN:ASR, featured a return trip to Southeast Asia by retired US Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf and CBS News personality Dan Rather, both of whom served in different capacities in Southeast Asia during the war years. Their current trip to Vietnam was the first time either person had been back to Indochina since the end of the war in April 1975. First and foremost, we must recognize that this particular program is a commodity. SVN:ASR was broadcast on network television, which like any other commercial enterprise exists to make a profit. Viewing this artifact at face value, the program appeared to be strictly informative -- a televised lesson in American military history given by a well-known military figure. One could reasonably surmise that the network...
Karlovy Vary 98
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

Moscow's loss was Karlovy Vary's gain. Why wasn't there a Moscow festival this year? Several reasons were given when the news broke at Cannes in May, none of them very promising for the future of the festival. Still, the Russian film industry is well on its way to recovery if the grabbag of features, documentaries, and short films programmed in different sections at the 33rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (3-11 July 1998) are to be taken at face value. For example, Karen Shakhnazarov's Full Moon probably would have opened the Moscow festival instead of premiering as the official Russian entry at Karlovy Vary. Produced by Mosfilm's managing director Vladimir Dostal, this rambling, intertwined, impressionistic tour of Moscow on a summer day from dawn to dusk is packed with a subtle run of sight and verbal gags. It opens with a scene shot on the very premises of the Mosfilm...
The River
Authors: Toh Hai Leong
Published: August 2019

HE LIU (The River 1997). Tsai Ming-liang. Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Lu Hsiao-ling, Miao Tien, Yang Kuei-mei, Ann Hui. Loosely strung together as the last part of a trilogy (the first two being Rebels of the Neon God and Vive l'amour) about dysfunctional families, urban anomie and loveless sex, The River by Malaysian-born, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang is about three protagonists or rather antagonists who do not really relate to one another. All three starred his favourite muse -- Lee Kang-sheng Xiao Kang (played by Lee Kang-sheng who also starred in the first two features) is a young man who, while wandering aimlessly in central Taipei, gets tricked by into appearing as a corpse in a movie floating in the highly polluted Tansui river. Xiao Kang's father (Miao Tien) is a morose-looking retiree who frequents the city's gay saunas. In one of the film's ironies, he accidentally picks up his own...
New Central and East-European Cinema
Authors: Stojanova Christina
Published: August 2019

UNE NOUVELLE EUROPE: THE DOUBLE QUEST OF NEW CENTRAL AND EAST-EUROPEAN CINEMA The Berlin Wall collapsed some eight years ago, along with the repressive totalitarian Communist regimes it came to symbolise, thus neatly wrapping up half a century in the history of Eastern Europe. Little has reached our shores, however, about the effects on everyday life of this unprecedented change, brought about by mostly "velvet" revolutions across the region. In March of this year Cinémathèque Québécoise launched Une Nouvelle Europe: A Panorama of Central and Eastern European Cinema, featuring 28 feature and 5 short films from 8 countries.(1) The selection was also presented in Toronto (Cinematheque Ontario, April 4-May 1, 1997) and in Vancouver (Pacific Cinematheque, March 22-May 1), under the title A New Europe: Reeling After The Fall. The organisation of the event was an arduous and time consuming task. It took more than a year and a...
The Cinema of Manie van Rensburg (conclusion)
Authors: Botha Martin P.
Published: August 2019

THE CINEMA OF MANIE VAN RENSBURG: POPULAR MEMORIES OF AFRIKANERDOM (Conclusion) The name, Manie van Rensburg, is virtually unknown in Europe and the United States of America. Recently, some of his work was screened at a South African film festival in Amsterdam at the Kriterion cinema and I had the honour to present a lecture there on 7 October 1995 regarding Van Rensburg and his work. His work was also highlighted in a small retrospective during October 1996 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The following is the conclusion of the article the first part of which was published in KINEMA Fall 1997. 1939-1948: The Rise of Afrikaner NationalismFusion, and the consequent split between General Hertzog and D.F. Malan, was of the greatest significance in the history of Afrikaner nationalism. Although Malan's Purified National Party was numerically exceptionally weak, confined largely to the Cape Province and with only 19...
Canadian Films: What Are We to Make of Them?
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

This technically fine picture was shot in British Columbia, but care seems to have been taken to eradicate any sign of Canadian identity in the story's setting, which is simply generic North American.       Film critic Derek Elley in his review of Mina Shum's Drive,       She Said in Variety, Dec. 22, 1997. NO MATTER to what segment of society individuals may belong within the public at large most of those interested in the arts are contemplating what to make of Canadian cinema. Among indigent artists, out-of-work actors, struggling writers, publishers and bookshop proprietors, theatregoers and movie enthusiasts, the question being asked is, what do we expect from Canadian movies? The puzzle begins when audiences, after being subjected to a barrage of media publicity and a frenzy of flag waving, which would have us believe that Canadian movies and tv programmes are among the best in the world, discover...
Two Asian Films
Authors: Toh Hai Leong
Published: August 2019

DESTINATION: 9th HEAVEN (Hong Kong-China, 1997). Dir: Wong Chun Man. Cast: Tony Leung Kar-fai, Pan Hong, Gigi Lai, Christine Ng, Sunny Chan, Lau Ying Hung.IRON SISTER (Taiwan-China, 1997). Dir: Yeh Hung-wai. Cast: Shu Qi. Destination: 9th Heaven stars Tony Leung Kar-fai (The Lover), Winston Chao (Eat Drink Man Woman) together with the Mainland Chinese veteran actress Pan Hong. Produced by the shrewd veteran actor-producer Raymond Wong, the film is a tale of love and business rivalry set in Hongkong and Tianjin (Tientsin). Iron Sister is adroitly directed by one of Taiwan's foremost New Wave filmmakers, Yeh Hung-wai who gained international prominence with a made in China film Five Girls And A Rope two years back. His latest work features the promising Taiwanese star Shu Qi (last seen in Derek Yee's satire Viva Erotica) who plays a tenacious huntress called Iron Sister Suen. The settings of both films present...
Frankenheimer on Location in Canada
Authors: Pratley Gerald
Published: August 2019

THE DISTINGUISHED American filmmaker, John Frankenheimer, has returned to Canada and is making his fourth motion picture there called Reindeer Games presently filming in Vancouver, British Columbia, for Miramax. The main players are Gary Sinese, Charlize Theron, Ben Affleck and Clarence Williams III. Frankenheimer is working from a script by Ehren Kruger, the writer's second screenplay following Arlington Way, released this summer. Frankenheimer first came to British Columbia twenty years ago to film Prophecy, a horror story rooted in the pollution of the environment by the logging industries. He returned ten years later to Calgary, Drumheller and High River, to film Dead Bang, a brilliant piece of work based on the true story of a vicious white supremacy movement. He was back a year later, to Bragg Creek, Canmore and Calgary, to make The Fourth War, set on the snowbound Czech-West German frontier during the Cold War and relating...
Millennial Thoughts from Central and Eastern Europe
Authors: Stojanova Christina
Published: August 2019

Where is that fragile line between different cultures, different       religions, different national or personal identities?       - Agnieszka Holland THE 19th CENTURY politician Metternich, a champion of Western European isolationism and Austrian xenophobia, is credited with saying that Asia begins at the Landstrasse, that is, at the street that leads out of Vienna toward Hungary. Over the last two hundred years of our millennium, Central and Eastern European countries have struggled to overcome this deep prejudice and reclaim their place in Europe independent political and cultural entities. And while it has been very difficult to do so in terms of economic and political modernisation; in terms of establishing long lasting state and social institutions that are capable of generating and perpetuating democracy, in terms of culture Central and Eastern European countries have scored much more successfully. In fact, often times much better than their Western European counterparts. Ten...
Movies and Money
Authors: Kern Johanna
Published: August 2019

PUTNAM, the Oscar-winning producer of such modern classics as Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Midnight Express and The Mission, shares his insights, knowledge and experience in this very well researched, captivating and, at times, humorous volume. He tells the story of cinema and he tells the story about money since, for some, money is what cinema represents. He starts his tale with the description of the first moguls in the early days of cinema, beginning with Edison and the Lumiere brothers, and continues, in chronological order, to thoroughly present the history of the film business on American and European continents to the present day. Step by step he documents the international success of Hollywood and the struggle of Europeans and their attempts to win their home markets. The economic war over the control of the world's film industry seems to have come to an end long...
Deconstructing Walt Disney's The Lion King
Authors: Wong Vicky
Published: August 2019

DECONSTRUCTING THE WALT DISNEY ANIMATION THE LION KING: ITS IDEOLOGY AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF HONG KONG CHINESE Walt Disney's animations have always been popular, largely of course due to their aesthetic appeal, vivid characters, interesting plots, and for the parents, obvious moral standards that save their time teaching their children. The artifact this paper is going to study is one of Disney's most popular animation The Lion King released in 1994 both in the US and in Hong Kong. The film broke all records in the first weekend, grossing USD42 million. It was similarly popular when it was released in Hong Kong during the summer vacation in the same year. Simply put, the story is about how a regal lion is victimised by his uncle: experiences an exile and a life free from responsibility: free by whim or by chance, when he grows up, meets up with his friend...
Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Puppetmaster
Authors: Ng Yvonne
Published: August 2019

ESSENCE AND ELLIPSIS IN HOU HSIAO HSIEN'S THE PUPPETMASTER THE Puppetmaster (Hsimeng Rensheng, 1993), about the life of veteran puppeteer Li Tienlu, is a groundbreaking film by one of Taiwan's foremost director Hou Hsiao-hsien. The biographical film portrays Li's early life from his birth in 1909 until 1945, when fifty years of Japanese rule on the island came to end. Li, whom the director calls "a living encyclopaedia of Chinese tradition"(1) is seemly regarded as a "national treasure." No stranger to Hou's films, Li has appeared in several of the director's works since Dust in the Wind (1986). Hou's themes are rooted in the daily lives of the Taiwanese, particularly rural life. His films have a nostalgic look to them but at the same time, an unmistakable feel of authenticity and originality born from a realist approach executed in a surprisingly stylized manner. In the film, Li Tienlu's...
Indonesian director Garin Nugroho
Authors: Uhde Jan
Published: August 2019

INDONESIAN DIRECTOR GARIN NUGROHO IN CONVERSATION WITH KINEMA YOGYAKARTA, a peaceful three-quarter-million Central Javanese city surrounded by picturesque volcanoes is not only renowned as a centre for tertiary education in Indonesia but it is also reputed to be the country's cultural capital. Just kilometres away, two fabulous historical monuments more than a thousand years old -- the Borobudur and the Prambanan -- attract tourists from all over the world to the region. But there is another side to this benevolent image. Thousands live in poverty there, among them many children -- the street children of Yogya. Their sad and often short lives became the focus of the Indonesian director Garin Nugroho's 1998 semi-documentary feature Leaf on a Pillow (Daun di atas bantal), "a discovery of the Cannes 1998 festival" (Positif), which won for the 38-year film-maker several international awards including Best Film and Best Actress for Christine Harkim...
Digital Video and 'e-cinema'
Authors: Wee Brandon
Published: August 2019

NEW HORIZONS: DIGITAL VIDEO AND 'E-CINEMA' When digital video (DV) was introduced to the consumer market in 1994, it would have been difficult to visualise it as a medium predestined to cast a shadow over the future of filmmaking. Vulcanised on the advances in digital technology, DV would not only proselytise a slew of economical and mechanical gambits to its superiorly endowed counterpart, but also attempt to wrestle power and centrality from it. And now, more than half a decade on, filmmakers around the globe are either basking in DV's therapeutic warmth or shunning its unsavoury heat. In contemporary Singapore, where the omnipresent label 'film industry' is a categorical misnomer, and where the financial realities of using film constitute a perennial cul-de-sac, DV has unsurprisingly been embraced as the alchemic alternative. Earlier in March, the Substation (a non-profit centre for the arts) organised a groundbreaking seminar on the business...
Sex in Asian Cinema
Authors: Toh Hai Leong
Published: August 2019

IN JAPAN, the euphemistic term for the sex cinema is "pink films" (pinku-eiga) or "roman poruno" (romance pornography) while the Filipinos call it "bomba". In pre-and-post-1997 Hong Kong, sex films are rated and popularly known as Category III (adult audience only). No matter how sex films are termed, this genre still raises a lot of ire, from the censors as well as from the public. Last year, many film productions in the Philippines were suspended for fear of more censorship. The promise of naked flesh and the chimera of sexual release has always made the appetite for this genre insatiable. Yet the more interesting films have posed complex emotional, psychological and existential questions. For instance, the male fear of emasculation was seen in the breakthrough "hardcore" sex film, Nagisa Oshima's Ai no corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses, 1976), based on a true story in Tokyo in 1936,...
Andrzej Wajda's Duties to the Audience
Authors: Miczka Tadeusz
Published: August 2019

ANDRZEJ WAJDA'S DUTIES TO THE AUDIENCE (OSCAR 2000) You may think about cinema whatever you wish but there is one thing, dear colleagues, that you must not do : to disregard the audience.Andrzej Wajda's to the students of State Film School in Lodz)(1) WHENEVER the principal values in the post-war Polish cinema are being spoken or written about, Andrzej Wajda and his work are being mentioned long before the names and output of other directors. The complicated history of Polish culture, the national style in art and the never ending conversations of the Polish people about the unjust history and difficult contemporary times are closely tied with Andrzej Wajda. He made a name for himself, first of all, because of his contribution in lifting cinema to the status of an art that speaks about current Polish and international problems. He is the author of an...
the industrial versus the artisanal
Authors: Stoneman Rod
Published: August 2019

UNDER THE SHADOW OF HOLLYWOOD: THE INDUSTRIAL VERSUS THE ARTISANAL IN 1848 a certain manifesto began with the words: 'A spectre is haunting Europe...' Now, almost 150 years after that seminal pamphlet was written and in the post-industrial epoch, the sentence could well continue with the words ' -- the spectre of Hollywood.' A range of statistics indicate the urgency and seriousness of the situation: American films have gained more than a 90% share of the Irish and British markets in recent years and the proportion is similarly unbalanced in most other countries of the world.(1) The figures are stark correlatives of debilitated production sectors and weakened reception structures -- European cinema as a whole may be in a period of remission... Given the scale of the incursion that has already taken place, the belligerent discourses and robust negotiation of the American industry in relation to the 1994...
Robert Bresson: Depth Behind Simplicity
Authors: Gorlitz Sarah Jane
Published: August 2019

On December 18, 1999, one of the world's greatest filmmakers, Robert Bresson, passed away at the age of 98. Although Bresson made only thirteen films over forty years, together they represent a body of work that is unparalleled in its stylistic consistency and the strength of its singular vision. Aside from Jean-Luc Godard, no other post-war French filmmaker's influence has spanned so many generations of filmmakers, so many countries, and such diverse aesthetics. Bresson's contribution to modern cinema has, however, only relatively recently come to proper recognition. As a result (and due to his own insistence on privacy), very little is known of the man himself or the events of his personal life.(1) What details we do know are vague: he began his career as a painter, turned to script-writing in the thirties (at which time he directed a short comedy, Les affaires publiques,) and spent the beginning...
Karlovy Vary 99
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

THE 34th KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL One film can make a festival unforgettable. That film at the 34th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (2-11 July 1999) was G.W. Pabst's Der Schatz (The Treasure, Germany, 1923), a restored print of a previously declared lost classic presented in the restored Divadlo (Czech for "theatre") opera house - a splendid decorative edifice dating from 1886, when it opened with Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" and now reopened after a 10-year reconstruction effort. Not only was Pabst's first feature film pieced together by the Prague Film Archive in collaboration with the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and the Cinematheque Royale in Brussels, but Max Deutsch's original score for the film's premiere in Dresden on 26 February 1923 was also found in the archive of the Frankfurt Film Museum. Another stroke of good fortune, for Deutsch's score is historically recognized as the first complete...
Solothurn 2000
Authors: Gwóźdź Andrzej
Published: August 2019

35th SOLOTHURNER FILMTAGE 2000: US AND THEM Another season of penance has arrived for the Swiss cinema. After the attempts at recuperating from the myth of Wilhelm Tell on the 700th anniversary of establishing The Swiss Confederation, after the voiced reluctance towards joining the EU and the complex of having Jewish gold in national banks, the time is ripe for the resolution of probably the most difficult moral dilemma which has been unsettling the country's hearts and minds for quite some time. At stake is the matter of the sealing of the border during WWII against Jewish (albeit not only Jewish) refugees from the occupied Europe, for whom Switzerland could have become the last safe haven. The slogan 'The boat is full', taken from the title of Markus Imhoof's film, popular some 20 years ago, has become a kind of a pang of conscience for the whole nation and...
Wels 99
Authors: Holloway Ron
Published: August 2019

KINOVA: FESTIVAL OF EUROPEAN FILMS IN WELS This was a festival of the superlative - the rebirth of the Wels festival in Austria, formerly under the aegis of the late and able Reinhard Pyrker (when it was known as the "Austrian Film Days"), today under the imaginative direction of Andreas Gruber. Renamed "KINOVA -- Festival of European Films" and scheduled 16 21 November 1999, its aim is "to focus on the European cinema as an aesthetic category of its own but also as a counterpoise to customary movie programs." In addition, Andreas Gruber pledged to be "frantically original" - and he and his staff were all of that! Italian master Gianni Amelio came for his retrospective workshop and remained for the whole week, introducing all his films (including the early tele-features) and chatting with festival guests about the breadth and depth of European cinema. During one of these sessions...