Guest post by Dr. Alicia Kozma, Director of IU Cinema. In 1956, film scholar John Twomey surveyed his contemporary film exhibition landscape and noticed a change was taking place: small, independently run theaters across the country were turning away from the usual mainstream film fare, focusing instead on what he termed “films of quality.”[1]… Read more »
Lace flits across the screen. Not in a single shot lingering over this delicate textile, but several still shots, one after another, a discontinuous display of the variety of lace patterns that might exist. We start gently with white laces, then frenetically — aggressively — move onto flickering colors. Lace-making is a women’s handcraft, and… Read more »
Guest post by Joan Hawkins, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. Based on a book written by Simone de Beauvoir, Pour Djamila recounts the story of Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian woman and National Liberation Front Activist who was arrested by the French in 1960, accused of terrorism and tortured. Under torture, she… Read more »
Guest post by David Stringer, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Second Language Studies. “I am water, only because you are the ocean.” — from “Kissing the Opelua” by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps Over the last decade or so, there has been an ocean swell of indigenous filmmaking highlighting… Read more »
For the past eight years, I have been trying to explain the sheer joy that is Esther Jane Williams. From the moment I first laid eyes on the champion swimmer-turned-actress in Thrill of a Romance (1945), I was transfixed. As I sighed over her delicious chemistry with Van Johnson and marveled at the film’s Technicolor… Read more »
Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber and Criterion. Summer is here and that means things are gonna wind down around here at the blog for the month of July, but I had one more round-up of Blu-rays to bring the people while we try and get some rest before the pandemonium… Read more »