Lace flits across the screen. Not in a single shot lingering over this delicate textile, but several still shots, one after another, a discontinuous display of the variety of lace patterns that might exist. We start gently with white laces, then frenetically — aggressively — move onto flickering colors. Lace-making is a women’s handcraft, and… Read more »
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. “For me, cinema is sorcery,” Nina Menkes says, “a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers’ and my own.” To begin to understand her work, it’s important to take… Read more »
The great film thinker André Bazin (1918-1958) famously appreciated a certain kind of realism that he identified in the cinema. Bazin’s use of the term “realism” has less to do with an emphasis on ordinary people and situations (as we might think today) than it does with the formal properties of the film image. In… Read more »
Since its inception in 2011, the Art and a Movie series, a partnership between IU Cinema and the Eskenazi Museum of Art, has done an excellent job of celebrating artists who worked in both cinema and other forms of visual art and design, among them Marcel Duchamp and Charles & Ray Eames. A fine candidate… Read more »
Though certain filmmakers have been making films for personal reasons, rather than institutional or financial ones, since the days of silent cinema, this tendency toward authorial independence only began to coalesce into a bonafide artistic movement in the United States during the 1940s – the decade in which American filmmakers like Maya Deren and Kenneth… Read more »
My introduction to Germaine Dulac many years ago in film school revolved around the surrealists. I learned about her fraught collaboration with Antonin Artaud, which resulted in a group of surrealists rioting at the premiere of The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). However, Germaine Dulac was so much more than an object of surrealist ire and… Read more »