Issue 22 | December 2008
ARTICLE
Yellowface!
By Rosy Rockets
No vision is more uplifting to one suffering a Depression than that of a woman gleefully bursting out of a corset, and the restoration of E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly marks a timely burgeoning of the New Burlesque movement. Since the 90s women filmmakers, performers and cinema fans have been reviving the world of the burlesque, from Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s The Notorious Bettie Page to Dita von Teese’s live performances. It is an art form originally contrived to draw the male gaze, and yet to this day has always been very much a focus of dyke chic and women’s’ liberation. The women of the The Smoking Cabinet collective facilitate a multi-media celebration of this hitherto forgotten sensation.
Content
ARTICLE
The State of Documentary
Guia de Isora is a small town of 20,000 inhabitants half way up the mountainside in Tenerife, away from the tourist spots, and the site of MiradasDoc, one of the newest documentary film festivals but with a difference – it’s dedicated to documentaries from and about Asia, Africa and Latin America.
ARTICLE
Alfredo Garcia and Other Peckinpah Tales
By Lee Hill
In today’s over-mediated popular culture, it is difficult to imagine a film director as brilliant, idiosyncratic, self-destructive and erratic like Sam Peckinpah managing to sustain a 25 plus year career. The prodigal son of a notable California pioneer family, Peckinpah’s gift...
ARTICLE
The Eye of Trust
By Almendra Maria Mcbride Perez
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys is organic beauty. Its sepia, black & white colours haunt the viewer’s soul, as much as the penetrating eyes. Turkey – the East’s gate into the West’s exit from sometimes claustrophobic union’s, is throbbing in every second of the film.
INTERVIEW
The Silent Majority
Returning to the broad and bewildering landscapes of America, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy offers a glimpse of the lives of the silent majority. Just as Old Joy elegantly essayed the nuances of the seemingly unremarkable, her latest film is a delicate deconstruction of human interaction...
ARTICLE
The Man from London
Somewhere in Europe a lone figure stands observing a dockside. The image is harsh, black and white, the tempo slow and deliberate, the compositions exacting and the camera almost floating. An elderly man with thick glasses sits and eats a stew, hunched over a table in a small restaurant...
ARTICLE
Look Around You, What Beauty! Long Live Kazakhstan
By John Gorick
I thought I saw Mr Bean at the Trieste Film Festival this year. No, Rowan Atkinson was not on the Competition Jury but a Polish actor called Artur Steranko was doing a very passable impersonation of him in the film Cztery Noce z Anna (Four Nights with Anna, 2008), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, his first film in 17 years.
MANIFESTO
The Cambridge Document
There have been, and are, filmmakers and videomakers who work in Britain. There has been, is, can be, such a thing as cinema made in Britain, but there has never been anything as coherent as a tradition, or a group of more than a handful of filmmakers...
