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In Conversation: P. Adams Sitney with Brian L. Frye
Thirty-odd years after P. Adams Sitney wrote Visionary Film,
it remains the definitive account of American avant-garde film.
Not least because it set a standard of critical excellence that no
other scholar or critic since has even approached.
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The Absolute Cool of Death and Horses by David Wilentz
Finally spaghetti westerns are getting a little respect. BAM
Cinematek features the subgenre this month with their, “Spaghetti for Thanksgiving’
series, the title reflecting the often tongue in cheek nature of these films. The Italians,
who have a history of producing genre films if not with finesse, then at least an unbridled sense
of showmanship, helped rid this American mythology of its cornball sentimentality, reestablishing the importance of cool.
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Cracking Movie Gromit! by Karl O’Toole
It was some time early 1994 my brother Mark mailed me this ‘brilliant’ short he’d taped from BBC
Ireland. From his description it was a Hitchcockian tale of double identities, sweet-mad inventors,
intellectual pets and jewel-thieving penguins - all made in Plastecine. I thought he was daft. Anyway,
I couldn’t play the thing - it was PAL.
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Pointless Pyrotechnics & Shomin Geki by David N. Meyer
Just before the closing credits, after about seventeen minutes of mind-numbing,
soul-rotting, pointless, boring, badly-rendered, unending kaleidoscopic ultraviolence
(over really bad screaming guitar {or was it really bad mock gangsta?}), our heroine Domino
tells us, via voice-over: “How much is true? Fuck you! I’ll never tell.”
The preceding two hours have been a memoir, sort of. With her ‘fuck you’,
Domino avoids clarifying any of the conflicting story-lines. She claims that
memoir and fantasy have been artistically blurred and that the sacred truth of her on-screen life is privileged.
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Docs in Sight: Nature and Society by Williams Cole
For many growing up in the ’70s and ’80s the nature documentary often meant
soporific shows on birds and the African plain narrated by an upper-crust Englishman that
you were forced to watch as “good for you” TV.
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The Rail congratulates the following winners of 2005 Ippie Awards from the Independent Press Association-N.Y.:
1st Place, Best Story About Immigrant Issues Gabriel Thompson, "When Even the Minimum Wage is a Distant Dream" (December 2004/January 2005)
2nd Place, Best Editorial/Commentary Theodore Hamm, "Arthur Miller’s Brooklyn Legacy" (March 2005)
3rd Place, Best Investigative/In-Depth News Story Brian J. Carreira, "No Room at the Inn: Ratner Continues to ’Game’ Officials and the Public" (June 2005)
3rd Place, Best Overall Design: Amelia Hennighausen
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