Indiana University Cinema

Monthly Movie Round-Up: September

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Establishing Shot

Men, Women & Children

A man in black stands in a decadent room

Ludwig

Leviathan

Two men wearing silly headbands look at another man in confusion in a club

Ishtar

A man in a suit and hat stands in front of a red train car

Bad Day at Black Rock

Every month, Establishing Shot 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 one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited. (more…)

American Neorealism: My Brother’s Wedding (1983)

Posted on September 22, 2022 by Jack Miller

A medium close-up of a woman as she looks at a man — *My Brother’s Wedding* (1983)

The question of realism in narrative cinema is an interesting and complex one. When a group of Italian filmmakers in the 1940s, led by Roberto Rossellini but also composed of quite different figures such as Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, began to produce works that have come to comprise the Italian Neorealist canon, their films were praised for their stark authenticity, their work with non-actors, and their forthright engagement with issues of working-class life and the sociopolitical problems of postwar Europe. This organic, almost documentary quality of the Neorealist films made an important impression on the filmmakers of the French New Wave and on subsequent generations of independent filmmakers. But in fact, all of these core works of Italian neorealism, from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) onward, can be seen as, to some extent, highly constructed and even sculpted works: most of them deal with scripted scenarios and with the directors shaping the performances of the actors, even if these actors weren’t professionals. And like all fictional narrative films, their rhythms and meanings are dictated by the editing and by which moments the filmmakers choose to show us. Cinema, by its very nature, inherently offers a highly selective version of reality. (more…)

“I am two bodies”: The Maternal in Two Lynne Sachs Films

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Laura Ivins

A woman in a red skirt-suit walks down the sidewalk, carrying heavy, metal protrusions coming out of the back of her dress like a tail. — Eve’s burden of childhood, from *A Biography of Lilith* (1997)

Lynne Sachs’ film output is prolific and varied, encompassing documentaries, essay films, non-narrative experiments, and installations. Like many feminist filmmakers, a theme running through her work is the insistence that the personal is important. Whether one’s own body, private moments in a doctor’s office, or one’s sense of family and home, our personal lives are saturated with socio-political meaning. Many meanings are imposed upon us by culture (such as how we experience gender in the world); some meanings we create ourselves (what we choose to value in the face of our acculturation); and some meanings are a rebellion, an attempt to press against the harmful constrictions within culture (reformulating a fluid experience of gender).

Sachs has explored this theme of the personal in different ways across her career, sometimes reflecting inward and sometimes turning the gaze of her camera outward. In The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991) and A Biography of Lilith (1997), Sachs turns her attention to the complicated relationship cis women have with the maternal. (more…)

Black Film Center & Archive’s Exhibit on Black Cinema’s Exploration of Home

Posted on September 20, 2022 by Establishing Shot

Lobby cards, a poster, and other ephemera in a glass display case — The BFCA’s exhibit in IU Cinema’s lower lobby

Guest post by Amber Bertin.

When the Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA) was approached to curate an exhibit from our collections to supplement IU Cinema guest programmer Maya Cade’s amazing series Home Is Where the Heart Is: Black Cinema’s Exploration of Home, we were beyond pleased to follow Maya’s lead and bring attention to the many depictions and interpretations of home in Black cinema.

The BFCA was founded in 1981 as the first institution in the world dedicated solely to the collection, preservation, and promotion of cinematic materials made by and featuring people of African and African diasporic descent. Over our 40+ year history, this has meant that we have been committed to preserving not just the films, but also everything surrounding them to meticulously document the depiction and artistic achievement of Black people in cinema. Our collections include such varied materials as posters, lobby cards, photographs, press kits, screenplays, filmmakers’ personal papers, interviews, and ephemera, in addition to over 3,000 film titles from all over the world. Through all of this, we have been resolute in our mission to create a counterspace in which Black voices are foregrounded and celebrated. (more…)

How Memory Finds Us: A Review of Memoria

Posted on September 19, 2022 by Noni Ford

Tilda Swinton as Jessica in Memoria — Tilda Swinton as Jessica in *Memoria*

Memoria begins with a sound and for the rest of its runtime our main character, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), is trying to find the origin of that sound and to understand why she seems to be the only one hearing it. We travel with her through Colombia as she searches for answers and we see the small oddities that accompany her journey, along with the noise which reoccurs in her daily life. There’s never a clear message throughout the film about what exactly Jessica is going through or why we’re following her story. There are many scenes that are quite long where we observe her in her solitude or minimal interactions, and at times it’s quite hard to glean what we should take from these scenes. Can this mystery be solved if we look at scenes more closely, or should we view them as a series of puzzle pieces that once put together form more of a tapestry of meaning? The only thing we know for certain is that there’s something going on that other people are unaware of, but Jessica can sense. (more…)

In Memoriam: Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Jack Miller

Black and white portrait of a man wearing a hat and glasses while smoking a cigar and reading a book — JLG

Rest in peace to the filmmaker who taught us how to see (and how to hear), who opened our eyes with his ferocious reconstruction of film form and with the emotional intensity of his images. Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema remains, above all, an attempt to restructure perception. His deeply sensual films seek to retrain our eyes and ears, taking nothing for granted, as if we are learning how to read an image for the very first time. In this regard, his cinema is one of enormous generosity and sensitivity in its respect for the viewer. (more…)