La Pointe Courte (1955), Agnès Varda’s first film, is often considered one of the major precursors for the French New Wave, a movement that would begin a few years later with (depending on who you ask) either Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958) or François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Varda has been branded the… Read more »
Tag: French cinema
Cinéma Sans Frontières: Beyond Francophone “Realities”
Guest post by Evie Munier. What is reality? Is there only one reality? Can there be several? These are some of the questions that the film series Cinéma Sans Frontières, offered by the French and Italian department in collaboration with IU Cinema, tries to ask. The rationale behind the series was born from the assumption… Read more »
Robert Bresson’s Surrealist Affinities
Robert Bresson is a filmmaker apart. Or, so his friend Jean Cocteau once quipped about him, and this remark has summed up the general critical response to Bresson’s filmography for decades. His work is inscrutable, seemingly without other film referents. And a mythology has built up around him – not completely without merit. However, over… Read more »
Contemplating the Animal: Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar
Guest post by Noelle Ibrahim. Themester intern Noelle Ibrahim had a conversation with Jonathan Risner, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at IU. They discussed the upcoming Themester film, Au hasard Balthazar. (This interview was edited and condensed.) What do you find compelling about this film? If I’m going to relate it to… Read more »
Godard’s Life to Live
A new movie and a special anniversary make May 2018 a fantastic time to revisit the life and work of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. A biopic about Godard, Le Redoubtable, recently played at the IU Cinema. It tells the story of his political radicalization during the late 1960s. One section of the film… Read more »
Disciples of the Blade: 6 Films Influenced By Le Samouraï
“A man got to have a code.” — Omar Little from The Wire If there’s one contribution to cinema that Jean-Pierre Melville is most certainly “guilty” of, it would be his characters. Stoic anti-heroes, existential killers, and methodical men seem to pop up as the protagonists in so many of his films. It was the director’s… Read more »