Like so many others, the exhaustive weight of living and working in a pandemic has really been running me down, especially now that we’re close to the one-year mark of this tragic, seemingly endless moment in time. One of the most important pieces of advice that’s been said during this past year, however, is that… Read more »
Everyone knows that Ida Lupino was a great actress — I, for one, have already gushed in the pages of this blog about her performance as an isolated, blind woman in Nicholas Ray’s eternally underrated On Dangerous Ground (1951). Her curious performance style can make one feel, through the slightest look or gesture, that one… Read more »
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. “For me, cinema is sorcery,” Nina Menkes says, “a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers’ and my own.” To begin to understand her work, it’s important to take… Read more »
Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked… Read more »
The great film thinker André Bazin (1918-1958) famously appreciated a certain kind of realism that he identified in the cinema. Bazin’s use of the term “realism” has less to do with an emphasis on ordinary people and situations (as we might think today) than it does with the formal properties of the film image. In… Read more »
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) revolves around a refusal of a woman to be looked at. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) will not sit for her own portrait, because she knows that portrait is the means to take her into an unwanted marriage with an unknown man. It’s the 18th century, though, and… Read more »
