Indiana University Cinema

Oleg’s Choice: Conflict and Contemplation in the Donbas

Posted on November 19, 2018 by A Place For Film

Guest post by Abigail Gipson.

Elena Volochine and James Keogh arrived in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine on a June evening in 2015 to begin filming the documentary Oleg’s Choice. The Russian-backed battalion in which they were to be embedded was preparing for battle the next day. Before the battle, one fighter stopped to talk to the journalists, and he warned them the conflict would be too dangerous and they should stay at the base. The soldier, Max, was right — their forces suffered heavy losses that night. “He probably saved our lives,” Volochine said in an interview. (more…)

Robert Bresson’s Surrealist Affinities

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Laura Ivins

screencap of A Man Escaped — *A Man Escaped* (1956)

Robert Bresson is a filmmaker apart. Or, so his friend Jean Cocteau once quipped about him, and this remark has summed up the general critical response to Bresson’s filmography for decades. His work is inscrutable, seemingly without other film referents. And a mythology has built up around him – not completely without merit.

However, over the past ten years, film researchers like Colin Burnett and Brian Price have taken another look at Bresson’s early career. They’ve found that Bresson’s relationships with avant-garde artists and filmmakers during the 1930s and 1940s were actually more formative for his film practice than was previously suspected. (more…)

A Very Brief Plea to (Re)Visit Bergman’s WINTER LIGHT

Posted on November 14, 2018 by Nathaniel Sexton

“My basic concern in making them was to dramatize the all-importance of communication, of the capacity for feeling. They are not concerned—as many critics have theorized—with God or His absence, but with the saving force of love. Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.” — Ingmar Bergman, 1972

“In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life — the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World,” 1839

I’ve argued before that Bergman’s films are often misread as essentially symbolist. I was first introduced to this argument, and taken much further, by Susan Sontag’s notorious 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” in which Sontag argues that, when considering Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence, “those who reach for a Freudian interpretation […] are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.” She goes on, summarizing her entire thesis, “it is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.” Discussing Bergman’s use of symbols in Wild Strawberries I wrote,“[w]ith Bergman, just as it’s true of our capacity to dream and our compulsion to remember, we feel the symbols before we intellectualize them.” Six years after Wild Strawberries, the height of Bergman’s symbolist flirtations, Bergman finished Winter Light. A hollowing out of Bergman’s attachment to transparent allegory and symbolic play, Winter Light is a film that, nonetheless, has been limited by its popular interpretations. (more…)

The Art and Craft of the Double Bill

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Caleb Allison

If there’s one thing I look forward to more than a film screening, it’s two of them back to back. A well curated double bill is a thing of beauty and a complex craft that often goes overlooked. As much as the creation of a film is a miracle in and of itself, how you bring two of them together deserves some critical attention here. Wine has its cheese, cigars have bourbon, and movies have, in my opinion, more movies (and popcorn too, of course). At its best the careful curation and close proximity of two films can enlighten, challenge, and reframe them in a whole new way, and at its worst, if that’s even possible, you’re still watching two films so get over it. (more…)

Contemplating the Animal: Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar

Posted on November 8, 2018 by A Place For Film

Guest post by Noelle Ibrahim.

Themester intern Noelle Ibrahim had a conversation with Jonathan Risner, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at IU. They discussed the upcoming Themester film, Au hasard Balthazar. (This interview was edited and condensed.)

What do you find compelling about this film?

If I’m going to relate it to Themester theme, which is Animal/Human, obviously that’s there. Balthazar is a donkey and he is the protagonist of the film, but in some ways his, dare I say, acting in the movie—his presence in the movie—is distinct from say, like a Pixar film, where an animal is talking. (more…)

The Death of Filmstruck: Maybe It’s Time to Let the Old Ways Thrive

Posted on November 7, 2018 by David Carter

In a 2010 interview with The Daily Mirror, Prince declared that “The internet was completely over.” In 2010 he was more referring to the idea of putting your music online for consumption and taking issue with iTunes and companies like it for not paying artists their fair share for what they were giving the music aggregate. Early in the decade, Prince had been distributing his music online himself and getting 100% of those profits (or something close to it) back to him. For a while he actually saw it as a viable avenue for artists to make money and the public to consume and find their media, but when corporations (and to an extent, piracy) started to be more of presence, he decided that the days of the internet being this wonderful avenue for distribution, consumption, and discovery were over and that the best ways were still the old ways,* the artist holding all the cards and the audience buying their music physically. He was ahead of the curve in that department seeing as by the time of his earth-shattering death, most artists will tell you that making a living off of fractions of a penny for streams on Spotify and Apple music is a joke and serves more as advertisements for the inevitable long tour they’ll have to do to really make their money. (more…)