As a high school student, I was about as far from being a film devotee as you can get: for example, I saw Disney’s Frozen in theaters three times. (No judgment, please.)
So, if you’ve ever seen Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, you can imagine the shock to my system it occasioned when we watched it in English class one year. Stanley Kubrick’s dark 1964 comedy about governmental mishaps that lead to nuclear destruction is bracing, funny, and irreverent. With lines like “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!,” the film pokes fun at the cultural concerns of the Cold War era but asks troubling questions about the intentions of our world leaders. However, for someone like me who’d never seen a film like it before, it mostly made me ask this question: Movies can be like this?
I view my high school encounter with Dr. Strangelove as the incident that spurred my interest in IU Cinema, the art film cinema we have on campus next to the auditorium. I love the way the cinema has challenged me as a consumer of visual media in the three years I’ve been on campus.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is, among other things, an exercise in attention. At times, I found it excruciating to sit through the painfully long shots that make up the four-hour running time of the film. But it was fruitful to interrogate why, exactly, I found it hard to focus on one image for so long—what does that say about society today and where we place our attention?
And last fall, I was able to take advantage of the “Bergman in the 60s” series the cinema held. A semester-long compilation of some of the Swedish director’s films from the 1960s, the series acquainted me with a major filmmaker of the 20th century I’d never even heard of before, Ingmar Bergman. Even better, it introduced me to some amazing films, like Persona, Bergman’s meditation on selfhood, public image, and the fluid boundaries between our bodies.
Mostly, though, the cinema has exposed me to the wacky extent of what’s out there. A few weeks ago, I went to see “The Spiritual Avant-Garde,” a compilation of short films from underground artists during the mid-to-late twentieth century. To be honest, most of them made little sense to me. But I tried to marinate in the discomfort they provoked in me and think about what you can do, exactly, with a piece of art that fundamentally disorients you. In short: it was fun.
With all of this in mind, I’m excited to attend the cinema’s free (but ticketed) screening of Dr. Strangelove on Saturday, October 26 at 4 p.m. Even if you’ve seen the film before, consider checking it out again—I’m sure it’ll offer you something new. Or, if you’ve never seen it before, think about giving it a try. I hope it opens just as many doors for you as it has for me.
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