Daily Archives: February 14, 2026

Helen Keller and Untold Histories (Hers and Ours): A Conversation with John Gianvito

From Cineaste, Winter 2020. — J.R.

It’s been almost two decades since I first discovered the fiercely independent, passionately committed, and poetically inflected cinema of John Gianvito via his 168-minute The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001). Later that year, I headed a jury at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film that gave it our jury prize, but it’s mainly had an uphill struggle ever since being seen and recognized, most likely due to both its subject matter and its running time. John points out that I may have previously seen his 1983 feature The Flower of Pain, but if I did, I no longer remember it; ditto his portion of a 1986 episodic feature that he originated, Address Unknown.

The Mad Songs remains my favorite film of his, yet even though it was available for a spell on DVD, it currently lacks a distributor. A powerful act of witness about some of the tragic stateside consequences of the first Gulf War, it was made over a seven-year period, including two years of shooting in New Mexico — despite the fact that Gianvito is a Bostonian, where he currently teaches film at Emerson College and was formerly a curator for five years at the Harvard Film Archive.

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From the April 28, 2006 Chicago Reader.

I was the head of the critics’ jury at the Hong Kong film festival last spring that awarded half its first prize to this macabre comedy-thriller from Thailand (1999, 114 min.) It’s as commercial as anything from Hollywood — as was writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s previous feature, which I liked even more, a crazed Tarantino spinoff called Fun Bar Karaoke (1997). Ratanaruang spent eight years in New York studying at the Pratt Institute and working as a freelance illustrator and designer, so his mastery of American-style entertainment obviously owes something to a prolonged absorption in this culture –though I find the Thai and global traits on view here no less striking. This picture might be described broadly as a clever version of Hitchcock lite, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have pertinent things to say about the present Asian economic crisis. (JR)

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