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 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.
Laura Ivins, contributor | Boro in the Box (2011)
Boro in the Box is a kind of fairy tale rendering of Walerian Borowczyk’s biography. In this film by experimental director Bertrand Mandico, erotic auteur Walerian Borowczyk is born as a wooden box, the product of an assault on his mother. Through abecedarian format, the film moves through formative experiences of this boxed-in filmmaker, experiences sensual and voyeuristic, and we can’t always be certain which scenes have some roots in fact and which are the product of Mandico’s imagination.
Visually, Boro in the Box is gauzy and tactile, an appropriate homage to Borowczyk’s own film style.
Warning: the trailer, which can be found on Vimeo, contains nudity.
Jack Miller, contributor | Blues Like Showers of Rain (1970)
This month I spent some of my downtime relaxing with music films — not so much documentaries which offer a portrait of a particular artist, but rather straightforward documents of musicians doing what they do best. I watched a BBC special from the mid-’70s entitled “Roy Sings Orbison,” which, like the title suggests, shows us Orbison and his band rocking out with all their hits before a live TV audience. I also watched an early sound experiment called “The Singing Brakeman” (1929), which remains the only extant sound footage of country star Jimmie Rodgers performing with his voice heard.
But the most special discovery I had was an obscure gem from 1970 called Blues Like Showers of Rain, an exciting hybrid of recorded music and La Jetée-like still photography. In 1960, the British cultural anthropologist Paul Oliver traveled to the American south, where he took a copious number of field recordings and photographs of now-legendary American bluesmen performing their tunes. Among those showcased were Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blind James Brewer, Butch Cage, and many more. This invaluable collection of archival material was given new life a decade later when filmmaker John Jeremy decided to collect the photos and music into a film which offers a vivid, dynamic portrait of this fertile period in American art.
This film also provides a political context into which we can place this music and its performers: we see photos of people being lynched as Black men discuss what was going on in the South as these songs were coming to life. It’s painful, and yet I admire Oliver and Jeremy for not choosing to act like this music came out of a vacuum devoid of any social or political context.
This film is a true rarity: as of this writing, only five people in the world have even marked it as “watched” on Letterboxd. And yet, it’s an important and vibrant work that anyone interested in American history or blues music would undoubtedly admire.
Blues Like Showers of Rain is streaming for free in its entirety on Folkstreams.
Jack Pasternack, contributor | DekaDonen 8: Dekalog: Eight (1988) / Funny Face (1957)
(Once a month, Jesse watches a double feature he calls the DekaDonen, which consists of an episode of Krzystztof Kieslowski’s miniseries Dekalog and a film by Stanley Donen. He’ll be watching and writing about these double features until November.)
The pairing of Dekalog: Eight (1988) and Funny Face (1957) doesn’t work on paper. Dekalog: Eight is a drama about what it’s like to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust, while Funny Face is a colorful musical about the fashion industry. But they do share a connection, albeit a tenuous one: both films feature excellent female characters and an emphasis on being true to their perspectives.
Dekalog: Eight is about Zofia (Maria Koscialkowska), an elderly professor of ethics in Warsaw. Her lectures consist of talking about stories which pose ethical problems. During one of her classes, a visiting scholar named Elżbieta (Teresa Marczewska) tells Zofia and her students the story of a 6-year-old Jewish girl who journeyed to a Catholic couple to receive help hiding from the Nazis. But the Catholic man’s wife unexpectedly rescinded their offer. After class, Elżbieta reveals that she was the Jewish girl, and that Zofia was the woman who turned her away. They spend the night revisiting the apartment where Zofia turned her away as Zofia reveals the real reason for her decision.
Dekalog: Eight is not the only episode in Kiewslowski’s miniseries to center on a relationship between women. But unlike the strained relationship between a mother and her daughter in the previous episode of Dekalog, the relationship between Elżbieta and Zofia is much stranger. They’re not friends or family, or even conventional enemies. They are ineffably bonded only by a horrible decision which Zofia made. Kieslowski lets the conflict between the two women play out in excellent close-ups that depict every little nuanced reaction to each other’s actions. The best shot in the episode is when Kieslowski tracks forward to Zofia as she reveals the real reason why she turned away Elżbieta before begging for her forgiveness. I won’t spoil it here, but it is a testament to Kieslowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewciz that they make you understand “the woman’s point-of-view,” as Zofia referred to it in class, even as they refuse to let her off the hook for her actions.
Funny Face is the first film which Donen made starring Audrey Hepburn. She plays Jo Stockton, a philosophy-loving bookshop employee who crosses paths with a fashion photographer named Dick Avery (Fred Astaire). Despite feeling insecure with her appearance, she agrees to become a model for Avery so she can go to Paris to meet a great philosopher. But Stockton falls in love with Avery as they work together.
This film is one of the best that Donen made that centers on a female character. Stockton is smart, driven, but vulnerable in a way which makes her more realistic. She has her own interests and desires which do not involve advancing the plot for the sake of a male character, and the film handles her romance with Avery in a way that respects her agency. In addition, this film has another great female character in Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), Avery’s boss. Prescott is driven and is shown to be the most competent person in her industry. Though this film has moments which aren’t feminist, its strongest and most memorable characters are Stockton and Prescott.
Of my pairings for the DekaDonen, this is the one which seems the most random. But when viewed close together, Dekalog: Eight and Funny Face reveal that both of their directors have an ability to create interesting female characters. There remains a lot of work to be done to create more films with great female characters, particularly by empowering female filmmakers. But male directors are not exempt from making films with great women in it and, as Kieslowski and Donen prove in this installment, their work will be all the better for having fantastic female characters.
You can view a trailer for Dekalog here.