Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is one of those richly polyvalent works that, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), deploys a central conceptual image variable enough to acquire a startling metaphorical complexity. The dual and divisible image of human nature at the heart of Stevenson’s work… Read more »
Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked… Read more »
A friend of mine once summarized the conceptual continuity of Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema by saying to me that one could, quite reasonably, “put all of his films together” so that his body of work played out as one, very long movie, and that it would all “make sense, synthesized together in this way.” His reasoning… Read more »
Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage are well known but often oversimplified. In this video, I offer my interpretation of Eisenstein’s film theory, drawing from his 1928 film October: Ten Days that Shook the World to illustrate his ideas about montage. Within Eisenstein’s writings, he repeatedly returns to the importance of conflicting lines of form and movement… Read more »
Alfred Hitchcock began his career in the silent era, first as a title designer and then as an art director, before moving onto directing his first (unreleased and unfinished) feature in 1922. As a young man, Hitchcock had an interest in the movies as an art unto itself, and he was influenced by Russian, German,… Read more »
Who exactly was Anthony Asquith? A British cinema pioneer, a reluctant aristocrat, a Hitchcock imitator, a repressed homosexual – Asquith has been subjected to all of these nondescript labels and more by various commentators, and yet today he remains a shadowy figure within the annals of film history. Despite his prolific output, which spans from… Read more »