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Establishing Shot Indiana University
Chris Forrester is a Chicago-based writer and occasional film programmer who's still chasing the high of seeing a Claire Denis movie for the first time (it's been five years and still nothing compares). A genre film-lover and Terence Davies devotee, he's interested in world cinema, canon building and the reclaiming of formerly-maligned films in the digital age.

Entries by Chris Forrester

Dislocation Blues: Wong Kar-Wai’s Love Trilogy

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A train runs through a futuristic cityscape

A train to a strange place in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 Contextualizing Wong Kar-Wai’s Love Trilogy, Chris Forrester explains how the films are in conversation with Hong Kong’s political atmosphere, the world-building that connects the films and their characters, and more. Few filmmakers have become so synonymous with a specific kind of lovelorn loneliness as Wong… Read more »

Highlight Reel: CIFF 2023

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Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore look at each other in a bathroom mirror

Still from Todd Haynes’s May December Fresh off of his time at the Chicago International Film Festival, Chris Forrester shares his thoughts on the films he saw, including buzzy upcoming releases like Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and the latest from such filmmakers as Todd Haynes, Hayao Miyazaki, and more. The 59th edition… Read more »

The Apple of Your (Mind’s) Eye: Debbie Harry in Videodrome

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Debbie Harry on a TV screen

Our first glimpse of Debbie Harry as Nicki in Videodrome Chris Forrester considers the role of Nicki Brand and the icon who plays her, Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry, in David Cronenberg’s prescient examination of media. “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” So says the wonderfully named Professor Brian O’Blivion early… Read more »

When De Palma Became De Palma

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Charles Durning holds up a cleaver

A surgeon prepares for a grizzly operation in Brian De Palma’s Sisters Explaining why Sisters is the first true Brian De Palma film and how it set the table for things to come in his career, Chris Forrester delves into the 1972 film’s racial politics, visual language, and, yes, the Alfred Hitchcock of it all…. Read more »

Until There’s Not: Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow

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A two-shot of a man in a suit and a woman in a fur coat as they look at each other with city lights in the background

Douglas Sirk melodramas are known for tackling big themes with style and intelligence, and his 1956 Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck romance is no different, as explained by Establishing Shot‘s newest regular contributor Chris Forrester. In the midst of the exceptional run of films Douglas Sirk directed in the 1950s, and nestled directly between two of his… Read more »

Another Homo Movie: The New Queer Cinema

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A black-and-white image of two young men lay in a bed together

Guest post by Chris Forrester. In The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), a lesbian video store clerk seeks out the history of a Black film star from the ’30s as she tries to make a movie of her own. Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992) retells and relitigates the Leopold and Loeb murder case with a more… Read more »

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