By the time Buster Keaton made The General (co-directed by Clyde Bruckman) in 1926, Civil War melodramas were already old-fashioned. In the early silent era, the Civil War and the Antebellum South provided fodder for countless narrative films by U.S. studios, so that by the time Keaton made his film, this was well-worn territory. The… Read more »
Bite-Sized Blogs
The Unmistakable Character of Grey Gardens (1976)
Few documentaries have as rich a legacy as Grey Gardens. In addition to its own cult following, this film has inspired such illustrious adaptations as an HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as well as a Broadway musical that won three Tony Awards. Out of all of the documentaries directed by acclaimed filmmakers… Read more »
Sorcery and Cinema
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. “For me, cinema is sorcery,” Nina Menkes says, “a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers’ and my own.” To begin to understand her work, it’s important to take… Read more »
“The Most Alive of All”: Why Children of Paradise is the Grand Epic of Poetic Realism
The original American trailer for Children of Paradise (1945) called it France’s answer to Gone with the Wind, but there are so many better ways to describe this incredible film. You could spend hours discussing its beautiful recreation of 19th century Paris or its excellent cast. But more than anything it is one of the… Read more »
Film Style in Documentary Cinema
“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 »
Magnificent Bricolage: Works by Joseph Cornell
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 »