ICE-Vision: You the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)
Wednesday, October 17 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.

Roy Andersson’s masterful vignette film “You, the Living” is a bleak tapestry of comic human misery. Composed of sketches loosely related to one another, the film is a flat, immaculately framed and executed slapstick comedy which takes existential angst as its starting point. Its logical center is an endless traffic jam; an emotion-less sex act lasts seemingly for hours; a cab driver dreams of capital punishment for a botched dinner trick. Andersson’s camera is both ruthless and sympathetic, static yet dynamic. Its cast of non-actors, bloated and pale, have an uncanny and sarcastic pallor to them, as if constantly reminding the viewer, “Yes, you really look like this.” J. R. Jones of the Chicago Reader asks, “I laughed so hard it hurt – or was it the other way around?”

Next week… Institute Benjamenta, (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 1995)

ICE-Vision: Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)
Wednesday, October 10 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.

Notorious for its violence, both on-screen and rhetorical, “Joe” is the twisted hippy-revenge plot fantasy which catapulted Peter Boyle into unwanted fame among the ranks of blue collar workers terrified of the social changes of the sixties, and into the scorn of the youth espousing the lifestyle of the counterculture. The first non-pornographic feature of Cannon Films which the critic J. Hoberman calls a “precursor to such subsequent guerrilla productions as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and Billy Jack,” Joe bears the undeniable on-location sleaze of Greenwich Village drug culture upon a satire made stunning and ambiguous by Boyle’s acrimonious performance as Joe, the twin faces of everyman hero and vigilante villain, whose friendship with white collar adman Bill (Dennis Patrick), the unwitting murderer of his own daughter’s junky boyfriend, climaxes with the irreverent defiance of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

Next week… You the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

ICE Seminar: War and Video Games
Tuesday, October 9 at 4:30 PM
MLC Room 248

The sophistication of war video games offers a stunningly realistic experience of ground combat and a glimpse into the increasingly virtual world of long-distance, push-button warfare. Far less clear, though, is what these games are doing to users, our political culture, and our capacity to empathize with people directly affected by the actual trauma of war.

ICE will host a screening and discussion of Returning Fire (44 minutes), a film by Roger Stahl. In three separate vignettes, we see how Anne-Marie Schleiner, Wafaa Bilal, and Joseph Delappe move dissent from the streets to our screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic spell of “militainment.”

Roger Stahl is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies with interests in rhetoric, media, and culture. His research focuses on the rhetoric of war, specifically the intersection of military realities and popular culture. For more information visit http://rogerstahl.info.