David Chute

The Quiet Man

David Chute
Om Puri’s resonant baritone has been burnished by the smoke of a million cigarettes. His speech patterns are those of a college-educated artist-intellectual. ”People say to me that they are amazed at the mixture I have in my career,“ says the craggy 50-year-old character actor, savoring the breeze from the......

Earthly Delights

David Chute
The movie musical is a relic of ages past, more defunct even than the Western, which has been pronounced dead and packed off to Boot Hill many times over. In stroboscopic music videos on MTV, posturing thugs with purple hair are dancing on the grave of a form of entertainment......

Closely Watched Terrains

David Chute
Think of it as the “floral fallacy” -- the Western critic‘s irresistible urge to describe the beautiful, personal movies that have been emerging from Iran as fragile yet stubborn flowers, forcing their way up into the sunlight through hairline cracks in the rigid social pavement. Flowers as surreally vivid, perhaps,......

Pixel This

David Chute
THE "DV FILMMAKING" REVOLUTION IS ENTERING a new phase, declares Jonathan Wells, director and founder of the ResFest digital film festival. "The first innovation digital technology brought to filmmaking," he says in the press material for ResFest '99, "was breaking down the boundaries of who could make a film. Now......

The Auteur as Gearhead

David Chute
Motion pictures are just a special case of data broadcast. ---Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995) Way back in the dawn of e-time, in 1996, George Lucas foresaw the future. In Thomas A. Ohanian and Michael E. Phillips’ book Digital Filmmaking: The Changing Art and Craft of Making Motion Pictures (Focal......

The Master Builder

David Chute
It‘s a shame that the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s fine current retrospective of films by the great Egyptian Youssef Chahine doesn‘t include a few more gems from the first decade of his near 50-year career. Now an acknowledged international grand master in his 70s, Chahine was an A-list commercial......
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Victorian Cyberpunk

David Chute
Photo by Peter Bennett"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?" "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded. They are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity." ---Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age NEAL STEPHENSON CAN FOOL YOU. HIS NOVELS......

Head Trip

David Chute
WOJCIECH HAS' THE SARAGOSSA MANUscript, released in 1965, doesn't quite live up to its legendary reputation as a mindblower, a movie that is famous almost entirely for being Jerry Garcia's favorite. If you're expecting something all swirly and psychedelic, this flat-footed adaptation of a classic Polish Gothic novel may seem......
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The Undead

David Chute
BRUCE STERLING WOULD LIKE YOU TO SET ASIDE your PalmPilot and your pager and your cell phone for a few minutes -- just long enough to contemplate a medium of human communication that flourished almost 600 years ago. It is an ancient Incan medium called a quipu, a pre-Columbian system......

Weird Art and Science

David Chute
"I KNEW WHEN I WAS STARTING OUT THAT I WAS A primitive," allows director Guy Maddin, speaking by phone from his home base in Winnipeg. "So the films would be primitive, and therefore I'd best choose a story that might benefit from being told primitively. All the elements have to......