Guest post by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed. This year the Ukrainian Homelands Series screens three films that explore memory from various perspectives. Akhtem Seitablayev’s Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017) is one of the films that touches upon the current tragic and traumatic stage of contemporary Ukrainian history: a military conflict in the Donbass involving Ukraine and Russia…. Read more »
Welcome to Score Keeping, a feature where I dive into overlooked and highly praised songs, scores and soundtracks that accompany great films. Near the midpoint of Spike Lee’s 1989 generation-defining classic Do the Right Thing, a strange but welcome moment is presented to the audience. Throughout the film a one-man Greek Chorus in the form… Read more »
Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked… Read more »
Who exactly was Anthony Asquith? A British cinema pioneer, a reluctant aristocrat, a Hitchcock imitator, a repressed homosexual – Asquith has been subjected to all of these nondescript labels and more by various commentators, and yet today he remains a shadowy figure within the annals of film history. Despite his prolific output, which spans from… Read more »
Due to the intensity of its anguished and baroque surfaces, its radical reconstruction of spatial dimensions, and its cartoonish, sometimes grotesque approach to performance and film dramaturgy, Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) – the Soviet master’s final work, one of the prime glories of the cinema – may be plausibly considered one… Read more »
An underappreciated pioneer with a knack for crafting wonderfully feminist fare, Dorothy Arzner is a filmmaker all cinephiles should know. A successful woman director and openly gay, Arzner was, in many ways, a rarity in classic Hollywood. She became the first woman to direct a sound film, as well as the first to be in… Read more »