Film on film.

CineAction is pleased to be celebrating its twentieth anniversary; having survived as a small journal for this many years is an accomplishment in itself. To acknowledge the occasion the editors have each written a short article on a film they value. Although not all of the past editorial members are represented, we are pleased to be including contributions from several of the founding editors. We also wish to express our sense of loss since Andrew Britton died in 1994. Andrew was a major contributor for a number of years and his intelligence, original thinking and insights gave the magazine some of its finest theoretical and critical writings. For example, Andrew's article "The Myth of postmodernism: The Bourgeois Intelligentsia in the Age of Reagan" (Issue 13/14, Summer '88) courageously exposed the fallacies of the postmodernist agenda at the height of its academic entrenchment. We miss him as a friend and colleague.

The theme of this issue, Film on Film, is intended as our celebration of film culture. It was conceived in response to the notion that the demise of the cinema as an art form occurred at the end of the 20th Century. We think the present day cinema reflects its complex history, keeping the medium vital and relevant. Contemporary filmmakers around the world reference and pay tribute to major influences that have inspired their work. The French New Wave's influence on the work of Wong Kar-Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Mingliang, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kairostami, Jafar Panahi, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch and Martin Scorsese, both in terms of visual style and thematic concerns, is an illustration of how the cinema continues to develop as an art form and remain central to dramatizing the social and political concerns of modern life.

CineAction was founded to provide criticism that would address social, cultural and aesthetic concerns as they appear in a broad range of filmmaking modes, past and present. We hope to continue to meet our original intentions.

We thank the magazine's designers, formally Stuart Ross, Kevin Connolly and Julie Jenkinson, currently Bob Wilcox, for their consistently high quality work and also the Canada Council for its on-going support. Finally, we thank our readers, both longstanding and new, without whom we would not exist.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Florence Jacobowitz & Richard Lippe

Editors of this issue and CineAction's first issue in Spring 1985.