Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)

ICE-Vision: Ile Aiye (David Byrne, 1989)
Thursday, September 9 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Ile Aiye is David Byrne’s breathtaking 1989 documentary on Candomble, the African-influenced spirit cult of the Bahia region of Brazil. . . Ile Aiye uses experimental film techniques, music, and cultural observation to express the life and rituals of Candomble and the symbolic manifestation of the Orishas, the deities which represent the wide range of natural and spiritual forces. The rhythms of the sacred drums and bells, a dance of spiritual ecstasy, offerings and sacrifices, divination and the visitation of the Orishas through trance are all part of the color and life of Candomble. Complemented by the original score from David Byrne recorded with Bahian musicians, the music in Ile Aiye includes ritual music recorded during ceremonies as well as popular Brazilian songs influenced by Candomble.” – DavidByrne.com

ICE-Vision: The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)
Thursday, September 2 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Gripping 1977 American thriller from Wim Wenders that turns back on itself with deadly European irony. Dennis Hopper is an international art smuggler, Bruno Ganz is a Hamburg craftsman. Together they commit a murder and briefly become friends. The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders’s films (Paris, Texas; Wings of Desire) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.”
-Dave Kehr

ICE-Vision: The Big Combo (Joseph Lewis, 1955)
Thursday, August 26 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“This 1955 film noir borders on total abstraction for most of its length and then achieves it in an astonishing final scene—a shoot-out in the fog that suggests an armed and dangerous Michelangelo Antonioni. Where the usual noir takes place in a nightmare world, this one seems to inhabit a dream: there’s no longer fear in the images, but rather a distanced, idealized beauty. With Cornel Wilde, Jean Wallace, Brian Donlevy, and Richard Conte; the director is Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy). 89 min.”
-Dave Kehr

Specters of the Outer Spaces Premiere
Saturday May 1 at 7 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art, Room S151
spectersoftheouterspaces.com

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) presents a film by Marie Porterfield: Specters of the Outer Spaces. The film stars Viviana Chavez and Carole Kaboya with original music by Basil Carter and David Mitchell, philosophy and poetry by Joey Carter and Samuel Barry, and features a multitude of other collaborators from Athens and beyond.

Beings called Specters from the outer spaces explore the earth. Although they are invisible to most humans, a girl of extraordinary vision, “the Believer”, is able to see one of the Specters. The pair embark on voyage of discovery and wonder. Based on the philosophical aspects of astrobiology, phenomenology and religion, Specters of the Outer Spaces addresses the incredible importance of the human belief in the unseen.

Formal attire optional.

ICE-Vision: Zombie (Lucio Fulci, 1979)
Thursday, April 29 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“This audaciously disgusting spectacle from the late master of gruesome horror, Lucio Fulci, was posited as a semi-sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which was released in Italy as Zombi. Tisa Farrow and a group of vacationing tourists travel to an island where they find a doctor (Richard Johnson) who is attempting to cure a condition that reanimates the dead. Things quickly get out of control as undead Spanish conquistadors crawl from their graves hungry for human flesh. The nauseatingly graphic set-pieces by Gianetto de Rossi include a close-up of a woman’s eye being pierced by a large shard of wood and a zombie fighting a Great White shark underwater. This relatively well-made shocker was enormously popular worldwide and led to the zombie-gore film becoming the dominant motif of 1980s Italian horror.”
-All Movie Guide

ICE-Vision: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990)
Thursday, April 22 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“One might have expected ‘Dreams’ to be a summing up, a coda. It isn’t. It’s something altogether new for Kurosawa, a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future. The magical and mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical. The movie is about many things, including the terrors of childhood, parents who are as olympian as gods, the seductive nature of death, nuclear annihilation, environmental pollution and, in a segment titled simply ”Crows,” art…In this astonishingly beautiful, often somber work, emotions experienced long ago do not reappear coated with the softening cobwebs of time. They may have been filed away but, once they are recalled, they are as vivid, sharp and terrifying as they were initially. Time neither eases the pain of old wounds nor hides the scars.”
-New York Times