Page 77 – Establishing Shot

All Hail The Donut King

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Michaela Owens

Still from The Donut King — Ted Ngoy in *The Donut King*

In 1975, Ted Ngoy was working as a gas station attendant when he suddenly noticed the delicious smells coming from a nearby donut shop. Curious, he approached the counter and ordered his very first donut, the glorious pastry instantly reminding him of nom kong, a similar treat from his home country of Cambodia. Just four years after this moment of love at first bite, Ted owned 25 donut shops and began sponsoring families who, like him, had survived the Cambodian Civil War and its horrific aftermath. This was a man who strived for the “American dream” and seemed to achieve it, only to later lose it all in one fell swoop.

A fascinating story that some critics have called Shakespearean in its nature, The Donut King chronicles Ted’s rise and fall wonderfully, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was so much more to this documentary than I expected. (more…)

New IU Press Book Explores Love and Loss in Hollywood

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Jesse Pasternack

Cover for Love and Loss in Hollywood edited by Cooper C. Graham and Christoph Irmscher. (Photograph by Margarete Mather, courtesy of The Max and Yvette Eastman Estate) — Cover for *Love and Loss in Hollywood,* edited by Cooper C. Graham and Christoph Irmscher (photo by Margarete Mather, courtesy of The Max and Yvette Eastman Estate)

Last month, IU Press published a fascinating book. It is called Love and Loss in Hollywood: Florence Deshon, Max Eastman, and Charlie Chaplin, edited by Cooper C. Graham and Christoph Irmscher, Provost Professor of English and Director of the Wells Scholars Program at Indiana University. Aside from a few minor/undated items, the book contains every letter and telegram sent between Florence Deshon, a brilliant and beautiful actor, and Max Eastman, a poet and editor of the radical magazines The Masses and The Liberator, from the beginning of their relationship in 1917 to shortly before her death at the age of 28 (possibly by suicide) in 1922.

Graham, a film historian and retired film curator at the Library of Congress, explained to me in an interview conducted over email why displaying the totality of their correspondence, which resides in the Lilly Library as a part of the Deshon manuscripts, was a unique opportunity: “It is very rare to be able to read both sides of a correspondence, and so gain as many insights into two complex and interesting characters such as Max and Florence. Such an opportunity should never be thrown away lightly.” (more…)

Light & Heat: Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess

Posted on March 11, 2021 by Jack Miller

still of Duane Jones from Ganja & Hess — *Ganja & Hess* (1973)

Even within the supposedly transgressive cinema of the 1970s, Bill Gunn (1934-1989) was relegated to the status of a marginalized figure. Gunn directed only three films: Stop (1970), which was never released; Ganja & Hess (1973), a vampire film which was retitled “Blood Couple” without Gunn’s approval and heavily recut by its distributors; and Personal Problems (1980), an experimental soap opera (shot on video) which was made for television but never aired on PBS, and which went unseen for nearly four decades until Kino Lorber restored it in 2018. (more…)

A Local Artist’s Response to Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Establishing Shot

Guest post by Ellen Starr Lyon.

I am chagrined that before now, Audrey Flack has not been on my radar. I am aware of those who worked in her circles, the other realists like Robert Estes and Philip Pearlstein and the abstract expressionists: Pollock, Kline, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler. The film Queen of Hearts outlines a story that I have heard many times told by realist/figurative/academic artists who were disappointed in their education at the hands of abstract expressionists. By school choice and being a later generation, I benefited from an art education (IU!) that included a variety of foundation classes, drawing from live models and anatomy drawing in addition to other media. There were failings of course, but I enjoyed the freedom to follow my interests while also trying styles and media I would not have otherwise experimented with. No experience is wasted; these experiences come together to create each of us as individuals. Flack exemplifies the successful artist’s path of learning, exposure, absorption, experimentation, and reinvention. (more…)

Shock and Alien Invasions: Valie Export and Invisible Adversaries

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Establishing Shot

Still from Invisible Adversaries — Still from *Invisible Adversaries*

Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University.

Valie Export (1940-) is a radical feminist Austrian artist and filmmaker. How radical? Radical enough to take a popular brand of cigarettes, Export, as her last name. She liked the design of the cigarettes, she told Gary Indiana, and she liked the idea of exporting herself from association to her father and ex-husband. “It was a style I could use,” she said.

Export was not the only woman or artist of her generation looking for style she could use. In the ’60s and ’70s, she explained, Austrian feminists had to come to grips not only with patriarchal culture, but with the fact that the Austro-Germanic patriarchal culture derived heavily from Nazi ideology. And like their radical colleagues, the Vienna Actionists, and the filmmakers of the New German Film Movement (Fassbinder, Herzog) they had to deal with the guilt they felt over their parents’ complacency within the Nazi regime. Austrian feminists were anything but complacent. (more…)

Homemaking: Womanhouse, Wylie House, and Public Art in the Private Realm

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Establishing Shot

The front page of the exhibition catalog for Womanhouse — The front page of the exhibition catalog for *Womanhouse*

Guest post by Mary Figueroa, Graduate Assistant Projectionist at IU Cinema.

“On November 8, 1971, twenty-three women arrived at 533 Mariposa Street in downtown Hollywood armed with mops, brooms, paint buckets, rollers, sanding equipment, and wallpaper. For two months we scraped walls, replaced windows, built partitions, sanded floors, made furniture, installed lights, and renovated the seventy-five-year-old dilapidated structure. Our purpose was to remake the old house into a place of dreams and fantasies.” – Miriam Schapiro, 1987

Over the past year nearly 3 million U.S. women have dropped from the work force — many leaving frontline jobs to care for busy households that now simultaneously function as schools, daycares, offices, gyms, and TikTok dance studios. In this context, questioning and resisting the idiom “a woman’s place is in the home” feels as relevant as ever. In short, I chose to screen Womanhouse for my Staff Select as a means of further exploring the one thing that absolutely no one is sick of — home. (more…)