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Stop Making Sense: The Strange Auteurism of Stephen Chow

Posted on by Aja Essex

Kung Fu Hustle
Kung Fu Hustle

Auteur theory is a complicated subject to broach, seeing that the debate to place a definition on the term “auteur”has been ongoing since the 1940s. Everyone has their own variation and take on the term that gets assigned to monolithic and specific directors. To me, however, an auteur is a director with a singular and specific vision that manifests visually, aurally, and thematically over multiple works. There are many filmmakers we celebrate in this vein, but some become lost or forgotten and some like Hong Kong director, actor, writer, and producer Stephen Chow are just plain underrated. An artist with a singular vision, he has somehow all but disappeared from the conversation about auteurism, despite being one of the most artistically innovative and financially successful directors in the world. (more…)

A Culmination of IU Talent: Double Exposure 2017

Posted on by Katherine Johnson

Poster for Double Exposure 2017

 

Indiana University is lucky to have wonderful resources in its students and faculty, facilities, and access to technology. On Sunday, March 5 the IU Cinema will be screening the Double Exposure 2017 shorts program, a culmination of all of these resources. With the help of renowned IU faculty, students from IU Jacobs School of Music and IU Media School were partnered together to create individual pieces. For each the result is an original work of film and music. Beginning at 6:30 p.m., audiences will get to experience each short in its premiere presentation with live musical accompaniment. As a demonstration of hard work, and a culmination of talent and resources, this is not a program to miss. (more…)

Touching Animation: The Extraordinary Object

Posted on by Laura Ivins

Dimensions of Dialogue
Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Švankmajer, 1982)

“Imagination is the biggest gift humanity has received. Imagination makes people human, not work.” – Jan Švankmajer

One of my favorite things about filmmaking is that it can help you see the world in a different way. This is especially true of stop motion animation, which often repurposes materials in novel ways to build imaginary worlds.

Anything is possible with animation. In this mode of filmmaking, animals carry on conversations; the rules of physics may not apply; creatures morph into new beings; and ordinary objects come to life. Watching “things” live their own lives is one of the most captivating aspects of stop motion, tapping into longstanding human curiosity about the world surrounding us and the desire to find its enchantment. (more…)

Art and a Movie: An Organized Window into a Chaotic World

Posted on by Establishing Shot

Still image from the film Pollack
Still image from the film Pollack.

Guest post by Seth Mutchler.

Our world is messy. Our world is overwhelming. Our world endlessly expands in every direction. Humans have many things that differentiate us, but the world’s incomprehensible totality is universal. Another thing that we have in common is art. Art has many functions but one that many, myself included, find the most solace in is taking the infinite world and creating a window. The world is boundless but the screen, the frame, the stage, the pedestal, the pages of a book; these all take interminable reality and confine it to one moment. Art makes the incomprehensible tangible. (more…)

Complicating a Simpler Time: Lewis Klahr’s Collage Films

Posted on by Laura Ivins

A comic book-style rendering of a couple kissing

 

U.S. pop culture in the postwar era often presented a tidy world. TV moms vacuumed in heels and full skirts. Superman’s hair was always neat and presentable, despite flying around the city faster than a speeding bullet. And media preferred to avoid moral ambiguities.

Collage animator Lewis Klahr draws from mid-twentieth-century pop culture – comics, advertisements, magazines – to create his films. But in the true spirit of collage, Klahr’s repurposed worlds are not tidy. He transforms the idealized homogeneity of his source images into meditations on the vices or cultural anxieties that postwar society attempted to mask. (more…)

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