ICE-Vision: Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009)
Wednesday, September 26 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
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ICE-Vision continues with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema.

At 87, legendary French New Wave director Alain Resnais remains youthful as ever, riffing on the romantic comedy and the art of filmmaking itself. An aging househusband in a bland marriage discovers the wallet of a mysterious and strangely beautiful woman, and the two pursue a bizarre romance that distorts reality and retreats into a dream world of its own making.

“Resnais’s people are all contrivers of meaning, tale-tellers compelled like Beckett’s ghosts to build and rebuild the scaffolding of memory and history as a way of insisting on their own significance.” – Michael Atkinson, Moving Image Source

ICE-Vision: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1963)
Wednesday, September 19 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
http://www.facebook.com/groups/120740834290/

ICE-Vision continues with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema.

“…this flick doesn’t just rebel against, or even disregard, standards of taste and art. In the universe inhabited by The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, such things as standards and responsibility have never been heard of. It is this lunar purity which largely imparts to the film its classic stature. Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and searchers for truth can turn and say, ‘This was trash!'” -Lester Bangs

ICE-Vision: “The Blood of a Poet” and “La Villa Santo-Sospir” (Jean Cocteau, 1930 and 1952)
Wednesday, September 12 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

ICE-Vision continues with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema.

The Blood of a Poet: “‘Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.’ Adding cinema to a resume that already includes writing, theater, painting, sculpture, and self-mythology, Jean Cocteau approaches it as a parlor riddle, a hermaphroditic catalogue, the ultimate medium for the aesthete’s search for the ineffable and the sublime. The dream and its dissipation, ‘a realistic document of unreal events,’ everything suspended in the time it takes a chimney to topple into dust. Two episodes in two parts each, from ‘The Wounded Hand’ to ‘The Defamation of the Host,’ with fetishes weaving in and out of each other. … At the finish line is nothing less than the ‘mortal tedium of immortality,’ harp and globe and all.” – Fernando F. Croce

La Villa Santo-Sospir:

“Shot in 1952, this is an ‘amateur film’ done in 16mm, a sort of home movie in which Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend’s villa on the French coast (a major location used in ‘Testament of Orpheus’). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork… This informal little project once again shows the joy Cocteau takes in creating art, in addition to showing a side of his work (his paintings and drawings) that his films often overshadow.” – Mike Pinsky

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ICE-Vision: Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berekley, 1934)
Wednesday, September 5 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Dick Powell plays a desk clerk on a glitzy get-away amongst the ranks of the American aristocracy. Short on plot and heavy on style, director Busby Berkeley goes crane-crazy in the haunting sequence, “Lullaby of Broadway.”

“Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” is one of the great film poems of American cinema. Superimposing utopia and dystopia, the sequence is a surrealist nightmare of class consciousness… anticipating Maya Deren’s suicidal trance film Meshes in the Afternoon.” – David James, Unseen Cinema (Anthology Film Archives)

ICE-Vision: Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947)
Wednesday, August 29 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

ICE-Vision returns with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema. Now on Wednesdays!

“A story of damaged faith and rising sexual hysteria set among a group of nuns in India who are working to convert a sultan’s palace into a convent. The film’s lush, mountainous India, full of sensual challenges and metaphorical chasms, was created entirely in the studio, with the help of matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. Powell’s equally extravagant visual style transforms it into a landscape of the mind.” – Dave Kehr (Chicago Reader)