At the risk of sounding too negative, I’d say that the majority of filmmakers, even some very good ones, are ultimately conventional in that they rely on established forms of film language to communicate with us. Throughout the history of cinema, it has only been a much smaller group of artists who have sought to… Read more »
Even within the supposedly transgressive cinema of the 1970s, Bill Gunn (1934-1989) was relegated to the status of a marginalized figure. Gunn directed only three films: Stop (1970), which was never released; Ganja & Hess (1973), a vampire film which was retitled “Blood Couple” without Gunn’s approval and heavily recut by its distributors; and Personal… 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 »
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 »
“In my mind, there isn’t as much distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.” — Abbas Kiarostami Cinema’s capacity to document the world around us, to faithfully create an indexical record of its spaces and happenings, is a tradition that’s been with us at least since… Read more »
Since its inception in 2011, the Art and a Movie series, a partnership between IU Cinema and the Eskenazi Museum of Art, has done an excellent job of celebrating artists who worked in both cinema and other forms of visual art and design, among them Marcel Duchamp and Charles & Ray Eames. A fine candidate… Read more »