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 »
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. The immediate post-World War II period saw an explosion of formal experimentation across the American art scene. In music, there was jazz, bop, be-bop, and rock ‘n’ roll. Classical music saw the rise of John Cage and experiments that would… Read more »
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. Now it’s for me to live out what there’s left to me, And I will not look back now, for neither memory Nor magic will protect me from these omens in the sky. — Miklós Radnóti, 1944 In 1944, just… Read more »
Failure is an underexplored subject in American cinema. The struggles and joys of achieving success are portrayed in blockbuster after blockbuster, while the unique phenomenon of processing failure and tentatively beginning the process of moving beyond it is less common to encounter in a mainstream American movie. Thankfully, Kris Rey’s new film I Used to Go… Read more »
Guest post by Christine Peralta. Deeply nuanced and wonderfully shot, Lingua Franca is a beautiful film about a Filipina trans woman living in New York named Olivia. Olivia is portrayed by Isabel Sandoval, who also wrote and directed the film. Lingua Franca starts with two phone calls, simple and brief phone conversations that convey the complexity… Read more »
Guest post by Kristian Segerberg. There is a certain beauty in not knowing what life has in store for us. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch touches upon similar ideas in his earlier films which depict foreigners traveling in novel places and exploring the unfamiliar. In his 1989 film, Mystery Train, Jarmusch shows a typical night in Memphis… Read more »