Cultural Upbringing Explored on Film There is no right way to approach the customs of culture or family, but these films make clear that this inheritance is a process of negotiation.
Speaking For Oneself Recent films made by black women are shifting representations of gender, sexuality, and race in ways that highlight the vital role their perspectives play in these ongoing cultural evolutions.
Visions of Boyhood It’s a little bit funny, but coming of age has a certain timelessness to it. That formative passage from child’s play into maturity, usually marked by the confluence of tragedy and love, speaks across seasons and generations, and maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we all know it.
Music in Film I cannot imagine my story without the sounds that have come to narrate it. What is falling in love or mourning, road trips or dinner parties, without that hum of music and the later possibility of pressing play and being transported back?
Switching Places in Film We’ve all dreamt it before: being someone else, being somewhere else, a change in circumstance that reveals something of who and where we are now.
Feminism in “12 Years a Slave” Steve McQueen has described “12 Years a Slave” as a feminist project. It is easy to balk at such a claim for the simple fact of a man making it, but taking McQueen seriously, an analysis of the film should give an indication of what the director understands feminism to be.
Re-Enacting Stories History is a thing we are always making. Many experiences are forgotten or pass unremarkably as we move through the world. Some things, though, need to be recovered and told again. Why re-tell a story? And how to tell it?
Romance in Film In truth, it is all fleeting: the season, our presence, the things that hold us here rather than there. And perhaps nothing declares that ephemerality so much as romance.
Memory in Film Memory and imagination rely on the co-existing of tenses in the present moment. To be alive, then, is this movement backward and forward, the complex and mundane experiences of holding on, of forgetting and of writing anew.
Shared Experience in Film Spring is in the air, and with the renewal that the season brings, it is hard to stop the mind from wandering, wondering, playing.
