Federico Fellini is famous for inventing the “self-portrait” genre of filmmaking. His 1961 masterpiece 8 ½, which is about a director modeled on Fellini himself, led other filmmakers to make films about themselves. Examples include but are not limited to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), and Pedro Almodóvar’s… Read more »
Bite-Sized Blogs
Images of Nostalgia in Julie Dash’s Music Videos
Julie Dash’s films frequently meditate on history. Daughters of the Dust (1991) brings us into the unique culture of a Gullah family on the precipice of change in a new century. Illusions (1982) imagines if a Black woman passing as a white woman had become a film executive in the Classical Hollywood era. The Rosa… Read more »
Light & Heat: Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess
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 »
A Local Artist’s Response to Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack
Guest post by Ellen Starr Lyon. I am chagrined that before now, Audrey Flack has not been on my radar. I am aware of those who worked in her circles, the other realists like Robert Estes and Philip Pearlstein and the abstract expressionists: Pollock, Kline, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler. The film Queen of Hearts outlines a… Read more »
Homemaking: Womanhouse, Wylie House, and Public Art in the Private Realm
Guest post by Mary Figueroa, Graduate Assistant Projectionist at IU Cinema. “On November 8, 1971, twenty-three women arrived at 533 Mariposa Street in downtown Hollywood armed with mops, brooms, paint buckets, rollers, sanding equipment, and wallpaper. For two months we scraped walls, replaced windows, built partitions, sanded floors, made furniture, installed lights, and renovated the… Read more »
A Few of the Film-Related Things That Are Keeping Me Sane
Like so many others, the exhaustive weight of living and working in a pandemic has really been running me down, especially now that we’re close to the one-year mark of this tragic, seemingly endless moment in time. One of the most important pieces of advice that’s been said during this past year, however, is that… Read more »