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Physical Media Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny: Fun City Editions, 88 Films, Arrow Video, and Criterion Blu-ray Reviews for August 2022

Posted on by Aja Essex

Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Fun City Editions, 88 Films, Arrow Video, and the Criterion Collection.

It’s a juicy season for the devotees of the disc. Movies of all makes and models find their way on this month’s round up. From Fun City Editions, we have the end-of-the-’70’s-tinged neo-noir starring Lisa Eichhorn, Jeff Bridges, and the late great John Heard in an electrifying performance, Cutter’s Way. 88 Films US brings us the follow-up to everyone’s favorite Shaw Brothers movie about lovely weapons designed for clean decapitations in the form of Flying Guillotine 2. Arrow Video delivers a long-awaited crime epic stateside for the first time called A Fugitive From the Past, as well as a double dose of Johnnie To’s stylish action with Running Out of Time 1 & 2. Lastly, Criterion brings us some welcome moody pieces of cinema: Atom Egoyan’s entrancing Exotica and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. 

Sit back, relax, and let me tell you about some fine films to get you through these autumn nights. (more…)

An Interview with Composer Yi-Chen Chiang

Posted on by Noni Ford

Coeur Fidele Poster

Last year, Yi-Chen Chiang was selected as the recipient of the Jon Vickers Scoring Award and will be showcasing her original score for the Jean Epstein film Cœur Fidèle at the IU Cinema on November 5th. She is a recent graduate of Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and currently works in Los Angeles as an audio/video QC specialist for Craigman Digital and a music/sound designer for Fu Jen Creative Design Center.

Before the debut of her new score, I sat down with Yi-Chen over Zoom to talk a little bit about her background, her influences, and the process of working on such a special project.

Noni Ford: How did you approach composing Cœur Fidèle?  

Yi-Chen Chiang: When I first saw this movie, I could tell it had so much tension in it. It’s kind of different from other movies of that time period. So, I wanted to use some different ways to compose, and I did some research on 12-tone technique and Impressionist music. And the 12-tone technique was just invented by Schoenberg in 1923, the same year as this movie. I think it’s good to use this composition scale for the film. Impressionist music is from the 19th to 20th century, so it was from the same period of the film; it came from France where the movie is set too. I imagined people 100 years ago watching this movie, with film being new to them and this music too, as it was just developed at this time. So, I wanted the music to match the time period of the original audience.   (more…)

Cinema as Portraiture: Dovzhenko’s Earth

Posted on by Jack Miller

An old man rests on a pile of apples
Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)

In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s definitive 2002 text on the Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, he persuasively argues that Dovzhenko’s cinema represents a form of “heroic portraiture” more than it does a vehicle for storytelling or narrative expression. Comparing Dovzhenko’s work with a more contemporary film by Jean-Marie Straub, Rosenbaum writes that “[Straub’s film] qualifies as heroic portraiture because it’s concerned more with who and where its human subjects are than with what they do as characters. The same thing is true of Dovzhenko’s films, where the low angles are more extreme and generally make the subjects even more monumental. The passage of time is often conveyed oddly and ambiguously… There’s a solidity and fullness to each character filling the screen that arguably annihilates narrative and ideology alike, leaving only poetry.”

This notion of a cinema that’s dedicated to evoking the potency and totality of its subjects, rather than to showing what they accomplish or sequentially perform within the fiction, provocatively situates Dovzhenko’s work within the non-narrative spaces of an avant-garde tradition. It also implies a kind of reverence on the part of Dovzhenko for the workers and farmers that populate his cinema – the kinds of agrarian figures that most films relegate from importance or ignore altogether. (more…)

Monthly Movie Round-Up: October

Posted on by Establishing Shot

Sylvie et le fantôme
Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell
Near Dark
Mr. Sardonicus

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. (more…)

The Foolishness of Love in Midnight (1939)

Posted on by Michaela Owens

A man and woman smile as they dance with each other
Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert in Midnight

In the decadent French chateau of a frisky aristocrat and his wandering wife, a showgirl pretending to be a baroness and the cab driver she fell for are arguing about the practicality of a marriage surviving on 40 francs a day. “I know we’re right for each other,” he coos. “I know it deep down in my bones.” Ah, but what about what happened to her parents, she counters. Without the comfort of money, their wedded bliss turned into constant fights. “They just gave up. They didn’t even hate each other,” she says sadly. Can’t he see that she is just trying to save them both from heartache?

For Midnight‘s Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) and Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), love came easily enough. Arriving in Paris one rainy evening with only one centime to her name, she convinced the reluctant cabbie to drive her around as she scoured nightclubs and cafés for a job. After many auditions, a cheap dinner, and some cozy dancing, he offered her his bed for the night and a shirt to sleep in while he finished his shift, an act so intimate that it made Eve realize just how deep their bond had already become. Frightened, she dashed away once Tibor’s back was turned, causing him to search for her while she stumbled into high society. (more…)

Shaun of the Dead: Why Have Two Genres When You Can Have Them All?

Posted on by Establishing Shot

Shaun, his ex-girlfriend, his friends, and his mom look unsure as they walk towards something
Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Guest post by Alex Brannan.

Horror and comedy – the salty and sweet of genre categories. I feel much has already been made of the horror-comedy as a seemingly incompatible hybrid that nevertheless persists. Not only does it persist, it has lived a life nearly as long as the cinema itself. The playful supernatural fantasies of George Méliès and G.A. Smith at the turn of the 20th century witnessed the growth of early in-camera visual effects while dabbling in a light macabre.[1] Edwin S. Porter’s series of comedy shorts featuring poor Uncle Josh saw the unlucky gentleman set upon by all manner of ghouls and demons.[2]

In 1999, Noël Carroll wrote on the unlikely pairing of horror and humor, speculating that perhaps the horror-comedy goes back as far as the origins of the gothic, with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.[3] Carroll wrote that the apparently at-odds genres of horror and humor were more naturally aligned than one might think, as significant portions of horror and comedy rely on a similar “transgressive play” with normative boundaries. While the fear of bodily harm lies at the affective core of horror, that harm often comes from a monster whose very existence is predicated on the transgression of natural boundaries – e.g., a zombie is somehow both ambulatory and dead. The incongruity theory of humor, which posits that humor can derive from the juxtaposition of two unlike concepts or schemas, witnesses a similar transgression of acceptable behavior (minus the fear of horror).[4] (more…)

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