Guest post by Chris Forrester. In The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), a lesbian video store clerk seeks out the history of a Black film star from the ’30s as she tries to make a movie of her own. Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992) retells and relitigates the Leopold and Loeb murder case with a more… Read more »
Tag: Cheryl Dunye
Meet Your IU Cinema Staff: Brittany D. Friesner
Get to know the people behind your favorite university cinema in our new blog series, “Meet Your IU Cinema Staff.” Using the format of our exclusive filmmaker interviews — all of which can be found on our YouTube channel — we’ve crafted a questionnaire for our staff to help introduce them to you, our audience. For… Read more »
Frames of Reality in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman
As audience members, we seem to intuitively know how to interpret films. We accurately categorize films as fiction and documentary without giving it a second thought. But how do we know which films are fiction or nonfiction? What conventions do filmmakers draw from to code their films as representations of fantasy or reality?