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 »
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 »
“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 »
A brief moment. The way the actor moves his head. The beauty of a face. A flicker of an expression that seems to contain all the meaning in a scene. Photogénie as a cinematic concept originates with early French film theory. We often use it to try to capture the enigmatic qualities of a film star,… Read more »
When I was a freshman, I saw two Jacques Demy musicals at the IU Cinema. They were The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. I saw them on Saturdays that were a week apart. My friends and I sat near the front both times, the better to absorb the spellbinding mixture of… Read more »