Guest post by Jon Vickers. “One of the signs of underdevelopment is an inability to establish links, to gather experience and grow,” states Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s bourgeois intellectual protagonist who idly roams the streets of Havana on his existential odyssey through much of Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Set in 1961 between the… Read more »
Guest post by Jon Vickers. My love affair with the sublime films of Japanese master filmmaker Koreeda Hirokazu (Hirokazu Kore-eda) began more than 25 years ago on March 7, 1997, in the small town of Three Oaks, Michigan. Maborosi had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September of 1995 (where it was… Read more »
Guest post by Jon Vickers, IU Cinema Founding Director Emeritus. It is hard not to conjure thoughts of Francois Truffaut’s 1973 film Day for Night when first thinking about Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep from 1996. On the most obvious level, Assayas’ “circus-of-a-film-production” is led by aging director René Vidal, played expertly by Truffaut’s longtime alter-ego,… Read more »
I was recently visited by a good friend named Max Westler, who drove down from Northern Indiana. Truth be told, he did not come to see me, but traveled to Bloomington to spend two days in IU Cinema, with the hook being Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó. Max is a brilliant published poet (retired creative writing professor… Read more »
The cinema of certain filmmakers has been more closely compared to poetry than narrative storytelling – often leaving gaps in time and space to give us, as viewers, the job of bringing our own interpretation, emotion, and personal history to complete the experience. This is certainly the case with experimental filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and… Read more »
Well, the day is here—we knew it would eventually come. The day when an organization loses one of its key members, one who has been there from the beginning, shaping what would follow. What followed was the building and opening of the IU Cinema, in all of its glory. The key member is Manny Knowles,… Read more »