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Establishing Shot Indiana University

Monthly Movie Round-Up: March 2025

Posted on by Establishing Shot

A young woman and teenage boy smile at something offscreen
Jim Carrey stands in front of a mirror in his bathroom
A man looks at a tape measure around a woman's chest
Left to right: Brewster McCloud, The Truman Show, Love Me Tonight

Every month, Establishing Shot 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 one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.

Jesse Pasternack, contributor | The Truman Show (1998)

Every film lover has their blind spots. They’re the type of popular titles which make people say “you’ve never seen blank” with an incredulous tone, or are so good that they make you want to drag that person to a nearby TV so they can watch them for the first time. Recently, I decided to fix one of my blind spots by watching a movie I had heard great things about but had never seen in full: The Truman Show (1998). I’m glad I did, because it lived up to its reputation as a well-shot comedy that was ahead of its time.

Directed by former IU Cinema guest Peter Weir, this movie tells the story of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey). Unbeknownst to him, Burbank has been the star of the world’s most popular television series since he was a baby. Every single moment of his life has been filmed and broadcasted to an audience of millions. Burbank has never noticed this, but he starts to have suspicions that will lead to a grand finale.

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“The Bang Was Before the Blowout”: How Brian De Palma’s Best Script Helped Him Direct His Best Movie

Posted on by Jesse Pasternack

Poster for Blow Out

Original poster for Blow Out (1981)

Jesse Pasternack makes his case for why Brian De Palma’s screenplay is such a crucial part of his 1981 masterpiece Blow Out.

There are a lot of sounds you might associate with Blow Out (1981). The hooting of an owl before a tragic “car crash.” The whirring of sound equipment as its protagonist tries to discover proof of a violent political conspiracy. A woman crying for help in a way that you will never forget. But, for me, the sound I always associate with Blow Out has nothing to do with any of those things. Actually, it’s not even in the movie. 

David Foster Wallace once described the joy he felt in reading or writing fiction as “click moments” which gave him “a special sort of buzz” that he had previously found only in solving logic proofs. You might describe “the click” as a moment when everything falls into place and works perfectly, like something you might hear a machine make. It is a sound you can hear in any great work of fiction, and it is one I hear every time I watch Blow Out.

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Watching the Watcher

Posted on by Noni Ford

Poster for The Lives of Others

Poster of Gerd Wiesler played by the late Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others

Noni Ford studies the questions of morality, complicity, and humanity that permeate the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others.

Why do so many pieces of media that involve an overbearing authoritarian government feature male leads who are working from within the system when they begin to grow conscious of the rot and corruption around them? While watching Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, I could not help but see the parallels between the central figure of Gerd Wiesler and Fahrenheit 451’s Guy Montag, along with 1984’s Winston Smith. While the aforementioned two characters inhabit Earth in different or alternate timelines, Gerd Wiesler is solidly based in East Germany of 1984. As a member of the Stasi, Wiesler’s primary talent is in the relentlessness with which he investigates suspicious citizens, pushing them to the brink so that he can gain even a morsel of information. He’s precise in his work and prides himself on his thoroughness; in our first scene with him as he teaches students about his techniques, he quickly notes down a student who states some dissent to his tactics. Whether in the classroom or in the field, he is always looking for an undercurrent of pushback to the regime to report.

While Guy Montag suppresses free-flowing information by incinerating books and Winston Smith shapes reality by changing historical documents to fit the ideology of his government, Wiesler is more involved than either in the fate of the people who are targeted in his country. What they all share is a surveillance state that they are actively participating in. All functioning as cogs in the machine, they perform their jobs well, go home, and have accepted the reality of their lives. They then experience an inciting incident that pushes them to consider what their role is in the system, the moral code of their society, and ultimately the individual over the collective. For Montag and Smith, the push comes from a woman, and for Wiesler a couple.

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Girls Running the World

Posted on by Establishing Shot

A large group of teenage girls stand inside a state government building

Still from Girls State

Monroe County NOW President TammyJo Eckhart, PhD, explains why the organization recommends the 2024 documentary Girls State.

All 50 states of this United States of America host a weeklong program attended by young people picked by a sponsoring American Legion (or American Legion Auxiliary Unit in the case of “Girls States”). To be chosen, an applicant must have finished her junior year at a sponsored high school. Other criteria seem to vary from state to state, but concern about current and government events, as well as academic and personal character requirements, are common. In 2020, the documentary film Boys State directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss showed the world what happened at one such event in Texas. Just last year, the same directors released a sister documentary, Girls State, which looked at Missouri’s 2022 program for young women. When the board of Monroe County NOW (MC NOW) was contacted in early 2024 about the second film, we were impressed and knew we needed to find a way to make this available for more than just Apple+ TV subscribers.

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Farrebique: Where Time Stands and Progress Whispers

Posted on by Establishing Shot

A title card that says "This film which was one year in the making was photographed from beginning to end in the privacy of a family of Rouerque farmers"

The opening title card of Farrebique

City Lights Film Series curator Ahmed Tahsin Shams observes the rewarding stillness of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946).

Rejected by Cannes, revered by history, Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (English: The Four Seasons, France) is a cinematic slow burn, capturing a world on the cusp of change through the eyes of those who must decide: resist or adapt? When Farrebique was submitted to the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, it was rejected outright. One jury member infamously dismissed it with these words: “I don’t consider cow dung to be photogenic material” (Travers 2015). Perhaps they were looking for grandeur, for cinematic gestures bold enough to define a nation in flux. What they failed to see was that Farrebique was the grandest gesture of all — a film that refused to be reduced to spectacle, that did not chase narrative but rather allowed time to unfold at its own deliberate, organic pace. In my opinion, this film not only anticipated the French New Wave but also pioneered today’s “Science New Wave” by exploring the limits of scientific storytelling and the intricate interplay between time, space, humans, and nonhuman entities.

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Radiohead’s Cinema of Sound

Posted on by Chris Forrester

Blurry image of three men in white standing in a line, surrounded by blackness

Still from Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” music video

Chris Forrester extracts what makes Radiohead’s albums Kid A and Amnesiac — which are the score to a recent rerelease of 1922’s Nosferatu — such enigmatic and rewarding works.

“I had never even seen a shooting star before… I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.” — Brent DiCrescenzo, in a 2000 review of Radiohead’s Kid A for Pitchfork

I used to think it was hyperbolic, beginning a review that way. Invoking the heavens, conjuring such a vivid scene, suggesting that the album to which you’ve ascribed that rare perfect score transcends the silly confines of good and bad and blazes through a stratosphere of instant pantheon records like, say, The Cure’s Disintegration, Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, or Radiohead’s own OK Computer… what hyperbole for an album that’s not even their best! But these days, I’m not so sure.

In January 1999, a few months after concluding the tour for their previous album — the star-making OK Computer, whose lofty hype and near-instant canonization drove them into the pits of depression — Radiohead converted a barn in Oxfordshire, England into a recording studio, and embarked on a writing process that nearly broke them up. The result was Kid A, a barren wasteland of an album whose spare lyricism and alien sounds still feel like visions of a horrifying near-future nearly three decades later, and the following year Amnesiac, a second record completed from the same recording sessions. Initially conceived as a double album, but released separately for fear of that gesture’s implicit desperation (and, one imagines, to flaunt the sheer standalone magnitude of each set of songs), Kid A and Amnesiac feel like a pair of conjoined twins separated at birth, raised in different environments, and yet still recognizably halves of the same depressive soul.

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