Celebrating Cinema
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Celebrating Cinema. With this issue we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Protestant film organisation Interfilm. Founded in Paris in 1955, its first President was Henri de Tienda, a minister in the navy and General Secretary of the Service cinématographique d’évangelisation of the Reformed Church of France. One of Interfilm’s main activities was – and remains – its involvement in juries at national and international film festivals. In the early days, the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches had separate juries. However, in 1973 in co-operation with the Organisation Catholique Internationale pour le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (OCIC), today known as Signis, the very first Ecumenical Jury met at the Locarno Film Festival, where it is still held in high regard.
James M. Wall
Empire builders don’t watch the right films. This became clear to me as I prepared several lectures that coincided with the 2004 U.S. presidential election. As is my custom in delivering lectures on most any subject, while I was writing, I was also looking for film clips to use, not to illustrate my lectures, but to offer material that would resonate with the theme of the current U.S. empire building project.
Peter Malone
Australian readers were recently asked to nominate their ten best Australian films. I thought I should make my list for myself. It included The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gallipoli and, to my surprise, Muriel’s Wedding. To my further surprise, I discovered that Muriel’s Wedding topped the readers’ list. What was it about this comedy, both broad and subtle, that appealed to so many viewers? After all, wasn’t it just a popular entertainment about a gawky girl who desperately wanted to get married?
Maggie Morgan
Egypt is the only Arab country that can boast of a commercial film industry. When people speak of ‘Arabic films’, they are referring to Egyptian cinema. In spite of the centrality of the industry, as the following article reveals, cinema is not exempt from the familiar frictions between art and society.
Carlos A. Valle
Llama mucho la atención en estos últimos años la recepción y el reconocimiento tanto como las expectativas que se han creado en centros internacionales con la producción de jóvenes cineastas argentinos, teniendo en cuenta que provienen de una cinematografía que mayormente ha estado ausente del interés internacional. ¿Qué es lo que ha producido este cambio?
Philip Lee
The first public screening of a film took place in 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière hired the basement of Le Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, to show La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière. That same year, one of the great comedians of cinema was born in the tiny settlement of Piqua, Kansas, USA.
Julia Helmke
The international church film organisation Interfilm will be 50 years old in October 2005. Why was it founded and how did it develop? Where did it succeed, where did it encounter difficulties? Fifty years is a long time for an international organisation that is exclusively voluntary and has neither permanent employees nor an office of its own. The following article gives an inside view of Interfilm, an organisation that always felt connected with WACC, but that nevertheless insisted on diversity and independence.
Hans Werner Dannowski
Interfilm has a new president as of April 2004. He is someone who had already contributed to the life of Interfilm for 15 years and who had expanded its work. When Hans Hodel was offered the presidency, he stressed that he would accept the office for a transitional period only, in order to give younger people the opportunity to grow into responsibilities and functions. The following affectionate words are offered in tribute to his commitment and work.
Arturo Zamora
En 1980, pocos meses después del triunfo de la Revolución Sandinista y del derrocamiento de Somoza, se inició en la Central Sandinista de Trabajadores la primera experiencia de cine militante obrero. Ese proceso fue parte de las acciones desarrolladas por el Comandante ‘Modesto’ (Henry Ruiz) desde el Ministerio de Planificación, contó con el apoyo de Naciones Unidas y fue dirigido en su etapa de formación por el cineasta boliviano Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, a quien entrevistamos.
Karsten Visarius
We are ill prepared to make out the future. We only know that it will be different from how we imagine it today. Realising this, it is astonishing to observe the number of future prognoses, scenarios and development studies being published, discussed and used as the basis for decisions. This strange future certainty is a late descendant of a rose-tinted Enlightenment that believed in the power of reason in history – even if, in the meantime, many forecasts revealed a difficult, gloomy or catastrophic tomorrow. As always they are determined by hopes and fears, by desires and interests. And this also applies to the comparatively harmless question about the future of cinema.
Cinny Aste
The Ecumenical Jury at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival honoured British director Ken Loach for his more than 40 years work in television and cinema. ‘The whole of Ken Loach’s work shows that he is on the side of human beings who suffer but struggle; who have every reason to despair but still hope; who believe that solidarity and caring for each other are values capable of opening ways of hope.’ The citation indicates why his films have received a large number of prizes and commendations from juries at different international festivals.