In Loco Parentis: Curfews & Curlers

Curfew and Curlers

Student Activism in the Early 1960s

By Craig Forrest

 

Jan Simmons was not amused. After observing women students at breakfast in the Dobbs residence hall group cafeteria wearing short-shorts, hair curlers, and pink bunny-fur slippers, she immediately issued additional rules defining acceptable attire for women in their dormitories. As the new manager of women’s residence halls at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Simmons had the authority to impose her own standards of propriety on the undergraduates in her charge. She justified her expansion of the rules to ban hair curlers, bandanas, scarves, kerchiefs, hairnets, slacks, and shorts in cafeterias and lounges with the admonition that “our personal appearance is as important as our behavior and our speech in conveying to others the kind of people we are.” The women who had to comply with these new regulations were unhappy, but in that September of 1961 it appeared that they had no choice but to obey Simmons’ dictates or suffer the consequences.

women after dinner
Skirts were required for dinner so many students kept them on for after-dinner studying.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the University of Missouri, as well as every other institution of higher learning in the United States including IU (see opposite page), still operated under the legal regime of in loco parentis. This legal term translates literally as “in the place of parents,” and it defined the relationship between administrators and students as one of a legal guardian to a minor. Since at least 1866, courts had recognized the right of colleges to regulate the behavior of students in the same way that parents regulated their own children’s lives. From the founding of the earliest schools in the seventeenth century, American colleges had concerned themselves with the moral guidance of their students as a necessary component of education. In accepting the legal rights granted to them by the courts after the Civil War under in loco parentis to govern student behavior, college administrators were also accepting legal responsibility for their students. By the early 1960s, students in institutions of higher education across the country were subjected to a myriad of rules and regulations as the legal charges of their schools under this in loco parentis regime.

The bedrock principle of in loco parentis as a legal construct was an understanding that college students were minors who had no claim to constitutional rights enjoyed by adult citizens.

At the University of Missouri in 1960 for instance, campus rules reflected this view. In addition to rules that gave administrators the right to censor student speech and regulate the types of organizations allowed on campus, there were rules governing the daily activities of undergraduates.  Freshmen of both sexes were forbidden from operating motor vehicles in the city of Columbia, women students were subjected to nightly curfews, and females had to conform to a dress code that required them to wear skirts, blouses, and/or sweaters when out on campus or in town. These rules had been in place at Missouri for years, but during the early 1960s some administrators such as Simmons began to expand them in an attempt to counter the attitudes of a numerically growing student body—a student body comprised of a generation that had begun to openly question the very idea of in loco parentis on campus, and that would work in the coming decade to roll back campus rules.

In April of 1960, the student newspaper at Missouri, The Maneater, reported that administrators had voted to extend the ban on driving from freshmen to sophomores in the upcoming school year without consulting student government before the change. Their stated reason for the extension was poor academic performance by sophomores, and, much like a parent would have done, they contended that eliminating driving privileges would remove a distraction from schoolwork. Instead of acquiescing to the dictates of the administration, however, students fought this rule change through their student government representatives. The Missouri Student’s Association (MSA) sent a letter to the Board of Curators, criticizing the sudden change and lack of student input in the rule-making process. The curators, upon receipt of the letter, suspended the rule change for the coming year and sent the issue back to the administrative board for further review. The administrators dropped the issue, and sophomores were not banned from driving.

In the middle of the brouhaha over sophomore driving privileges, an unnamed former MSA president penned a guest column in The Maneater titled “Students Still Kids Officially.” The author of this column, although without referencing in loco parentis, challenged the administration to give students more of a voice in campus rules that governed their lives. He decried the administrators’ attitude that students were too immature to govern themselves, and suggested that the reason some students acted immaturely was because they were treated as adolescents incapable of self-control. The only remedy for this catch-22 situation was for administrators to acknowledge that college students were indeed mature adults, and include them in the rule-making process. In hindsight, the former student body president’s column appears prescient, because students did in fact take an active role in changing campus rules during the following years.

One of the most dramatic changes in rules at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 1960s was the rolling back, and even the elimination, of women’s curfews. In 1960, all female students were required to be in their residence by a certain time each evening. Freshmen women had to be in by 7:30 Sunday through Thursday night, and by 12:30 am on Friday and Saturday nights. All other females had a curfew of 10:30 on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, 11:30 on Wednesday and Sunday nights, and 12:30 am on Friday and Saturday. If a student accumulated more than twenty “late minutes” over the course of a semester, she would be “campused,” or grounded to her room between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. for a number of nights determined by a disciplinary committee. Beginning with the 1962-63 school year, the Association of Women Students (AWS) would successfully push for and succeed in getting many changes to these curfew rules. They were aided in their quest by the Director of Student Affairs for Women, Gladys Pihlblad, whose believed that women students should be given greater freedom on campus. She did not advocate for a complete elimination of hours for females at Missouri in the early 1960s, but she did express the opinion that AWS should be more involved in making the rules for women on campus.

The first change to women’s curfews at Missouri since before World War II came in the fall of 1962. Because of the growing number of female students, all-freshman female dormitories were to be eliminated in 1962-63. AWS proposed that freshmen women be given the same curfew as older females, in part to eliminate the difficulty of having to enforce a separate curfew on students in the same residence hall. The Committee on Student Affairs, made up of administrators including Pihlblad and the Dean of Students, Jack Matthews, approved this rule change. Whether the committee was declaring that eighteen-year-old freshmen women were as mature as twenty-two-year-old seniors, or just trying to streamline curfew enforcement, this constituted an expansion of freedom for women on campus.

By the end of the 1962-63 school year, AWS next began a campaign for “key privileges” for senior women. Key privileges allowed females with senior standing to be issued a key to their residence halls, essentially ending the curfew for those students. Women who wanted to participate in the program were required to get their parents’ permission, and that parental permission would be a first step in releasing the university, in part, from its in loco parentis responsibilities. Negotiations between AWS and administrators went quickly, and the key program went into effect during the spring semester of 1964 for seniors. During the 1964-65 year, AWS lobbied for an extension of key privileges to younger women, and juniors were included in the program during the 1966-67 academic year. Sophomores would be given keys in 1968. In the meantime, AWS was successful during the 1963-64 school year in pushing back the curfew for all women to 11:30 on Sunday through Thursday nights, and to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturdays. These changes to the curfew rules at Missouri over the course of only five years were the result of student activism—not an activism as well remembered as the higher profile and more publicized activism of the Free Speech and Anti-War Movements, but activism through student government organizations working within the system to effect change.

Simmons’ September, 1961 expansion of the female dress code regulations to residence hall cafeterias and lounges was confronted by a burst of activism as well. In the first week of October, women in the Dobbs group planned a sit-in style demonstration to protest having to dress up for meals. Their plan was for a large number of females to try and get served their dinner while wearing slacks and Bermuda shorts in violation of Simmons’ new rules. Unfortunately for the would-be protesters, Simmons got wind of the plot, and she declared that participants would be punished for “promoting a riot.” The students cancelled their act of civil disobedience, but by working through AWS and the Women’s Residence Hall Association (WRHA) they were able to entirely eliminate the dress code on campus by the end of 1965. Administrators in the first half of the 1960s responded to student pressure and agreed to relinquish their in loco parentis authority, and students continued to push for increased freedom from campus rules through their student government organizations.

By the late 1960s, however, administrators at Missouri and other colleges nationwide became more resistant to the increased demands by students for more freedom on campus. The resulting Free Speech Movement, which began at the University of California Berkeley in 1964, and the desire of students at Missouri to end the “intervisitation” ban, which denied the right of students to visit members of the opposite sex in their personal rooms, found administrators refusing to accept any more loosening of rules that would reduce their in loco parentis rights. In large part, this refusal was borne of the fact that the courts, which had established the in loco parentis regime making administrators responsible for their students as guardians, had yet to release colleges from that legal standing. Court cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s relating to student free speech would explicitly do just that, and only then did universities nationwide relinquish their in loco parentis role.

What the examples at Missouri in the early years of the 1960s show, however, is that even before the well-known Free Speech Movement students on college campuses were actively working to free themselves from in loco parentis controls. These efforts by students are not remembered today nearly as well as the higher-profile campus disturbances of the later 1960s, but they were just as important to students gaining their rights as legal adults as their later efforts. Even in the early 1960s, administrators were signaling their willingness to modify in loco parentis rules, but it was the activism of students that prodded them to do so. The student rights movement, which ultimately resulted in college students being recognized as citizens with constitutionally protected rights, had begun well before the Free Speech Movement appeared on campuses across the country. The better-known Free Speech Movement was actually an extension of these earlier battles for freedom for students on campus, not a spontaneous development with no connection to past events. Modern college students who enjoy their freedoms on campus should be grateful to their predecessors for their rights, and they should be on guard to defend them against current challenges, such as speech codes that restrict free expression, which have been instituted at many schools in the past twenty-five years.

Craig Forrest is a graduate student in History at the University of Missouri.

 

 

 

 

Big Talk: Young Adult Author Julia Karr

A Sixteen That’s Not So Sweet ● by Michael G. Glab

 

Julia Karr had a vision of the world in the year 2150. In this vision, she saw teenaged girls buffeted from all sides with messages that they should be sexy. If they’re not, well, they’re beyond help. In fact, in Karr’s fantasy world girls who hit the age of 16 are celebrated because they are now legal; that is, they can have sex, fulfilling all expectations — really, the only expectation.

Karr titled her first book XVI. The numeral is Roman, indicating what a momentous landmark it is to reach that age, as important as our world’s Super Bowl. In it, she lays out her dystopia in detail. XVI and its sequel Truth are Young Adult novels in the speculative fiction genre. Their main character is Nina, a rebel who is certain there must be something more for her than simply becoming a sex toy.

YA books with female characters generally are gobbled up by teenaged girls. But Karr has found the boys seem to like Nina and her story just as much as the girls do.

“They do,” Karr says. “I did a Library Talk up in Indianapolis. A teacher had brought in her senior English class. XVI was required reading for the class. Half of the students that came were guys. It was an underprivileged school. The thing that was wonderful was everybody had read the book. Most of the questions I got were from the guys. There was one guy who said ‘You know I never even bothered to read a book before we had to read this and I just couldn’t put it down. Afterward, I had one kid come up to me. There is a scene in the book where the police come and tear through Nina’s apartment, looking for stuff. This kid comes up to me , and he’s like towering over me, and he says, ‘That police scene, they really do that. How did you know that?’

“First thing I thought was, ‘Well, he knows they really do that, too.’ I said, ‘You know, I’ve been in that situation before. I’ve had them come and go through my house like that. So I understand it.’”

Thus proving one of Karr’s core beliefs: The writer is always writing. “You are even if you don’t think you are,” she says. “While you’re doing other things, your mind is constantly processing.” Even when Karr is pulling weeds in her garden, she’s thinking about her feelings, her situation, and filing those thoughts away in case she needs to use them in some as yet unwritten chapter. To write the scene in which the cops ransack Nina’s home, she reached back to the night when she (Karr) was 20 and the police were tearing through her apartment. The circumstances were funny, but the feelings she had that night came in handy nearly 40 years later when she was an author.

“It had to do with a spider,” Karr says. “A giant spider. I came home, there was a giant spider in my house. It was two o’clock in the morning. What do you do? I saw it and then it ran. It was just a small apartment, a studio apartment. I called my brother in law and I said ‘Come over there’s a spider…!’ He said, ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning — call the cops,’ and hung up on me. So that’s exactly what I did; I called the police and I said, ‘I don’t know if it’s somebody’s pet tarantula or what….’ We’re talking a giant spider. The police show up and, obviously, what do they think? We’re talking 1970 or so — she’s on LSD!

They tore my apartment apart. They looked through the drawers. They looked through everything. And they didn’t find the spider. Meanwhile, I’m perched on my bed, watching the door. I did not see the spider go out the door so I knew the spider was still in when they left.”

Some friendly neighbors came by to console her after the police had rousted her apartment. One of the neighbors eventually found and killed the spider. “That thing curled up into something the size of a jacks ball,” Karr recalls.

“So, I was able to use that — How you feel when the police are there? You feel powerless. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. I was able to put that in my story. What happened to me back then resonated with a seventeen year old black kid from a disadvantaged part of Indianapolis. So, you can connect with your readers if you’re honest about what you’re writing. It all comes down to honesty, and he connected with that. All that goes to say, guys read my books, the girls read ‘em, and they all have something to say.”

Julia Karr: Every writer writes differently. But when I’m just sitting there staring off in space and there’s a blank computer screen in front of me, what I’m usually doing is seeing what happens next. Case in point: I’ve been revising my recent work in progress. Here I am, writing this new beginning, a new opening for my story, and lo and behold, first paragraph, a new character appears! He’s definitely a foil for my main character. I’m like, ‘Whoa!’

I’m not giving anything away when I say there’s fencing in this scene. We’re talking the grand art of fencing which I know very little about other than the fact that Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts — in the greatest scene in the world — the two of them are fencing at the top of the cliffs in The Princess Bride. So, somehow or another, fencing seemed to work into my story and I didn’t know anything about it. I went to the library and got a couple of books out about fencing. If I were maybe 30 years younger, I might consider learning how to fence — and I might anyway! Who knows? But I’m reading these books and I’m learning and I’m thinking about it and I’m understanding some things about the rules of fencing and how opponents interact with each other. It hit me that at the end of a fencing match, you salute your opponent. You have your sword out to the side and you bring your hand up toward your chin in a salute. You’re not supposed to look triumphant. You’re not supposed to look downtrodden. Won, lost, whatever; you’re supposed to have a very even demeanor. I thought about that. I was visualizing. My main character has just finished with this bout and she’s going to salute this person.

Who is this person? Is it just some nameless opponent? Or is there some kind of history going on there? All of a sudden this character just popped up and said ‘This is who I am.’

Michael G. Glab: So, the book writes itself?

JK: It does. I think it was Handel who said, ‘I’m taking dictation from God.’ I have struggled putting words down on the page, more often than not, but I have also found myself in the zone where it’s more like I’m reading what’s on the page rather than typing. Your subconscious is an amazing thing and it definitely takes over. I’ve discovered this not only from this zonal writing which is wonderful and doesn’t happen nearly as often as writers would like it to, there’s also this strange coincidence that happens, this little bit of serendipity, where you write something in your early chapters and you’re not exactly sure why you wrote it and then you end up, as you’re writing the end of the book, and all of a sudden you realize how important that one little thing that you put in chapter two suddenly becomes. If you hadn’t put it in there, you wouldn’t have gotten to this point but you didn’t even realize it when you wrote it. That happens a lot. In some of the books I’ve read about writing, people talk about that. They say, ‘If something feels like it needs to be included, include it, because you can always cut it later. But you never know if it is going to be the hinge for your plot.

It’s kind of like the seventh Harry Potter book. J.K. Rowling was explaining and bringing to fruition and closing doors and opening windows of things that happened in the first six books, that you had almost even forgotten about. She knew she was writing seven books.

MG: She wrote in coffeehouses. Describe your writing space.

JK: I usually write at my dining room table. It’s just a circular table, I plug in my laptop, sit down, fight off the cats who feel like they have to lay on the keyboard. I’ve got my cup of tea. I like to get up early before the rest of the world is up, do a little bit of journaling, and then get into whatever I’m working on. So it’s dark out, the shades are drawn.

The thing is, the minute I see the sun, I want to be doing something outside. I want to be physically doing something rather than writing.

MG: Nina, your protagonist in XVI and Truth, turns 16 in the year 2150. What is significant about 16?

JK: In the book, girls become adults at 16. They are basically primed, by the media — and if any if this sounds familiar, I’m not surprised — by shows, by radio, by advertisement, whatever the means are at that point in time, a constant media bombardment — to be sexual. That they are sexual beings before they become people. The most important thing for a girl is to be attractive to the opposite sex.

MG: It does sound familiar because a lot of that goes on now.

JK: Exactly. That was one of the things that really hit me: If our society continues on unchecked — and, believe me, I’m not a prude; people are sexual beings — but girls at eight do not need to have push-up bras. Little babies don’t need to have….

MG: Underpants that say ‘Juicy’? I saw an ad for them the other day.

JK: Right. People don’t need to be sexualized. We are sexual. It doesn’t need to be the focus of who you are. Nina’s best friend, Sandy, in XVI, has totally embraced the 16-idea. Sixteen Ways is her favorite zine. She buys into all of their how-tos. She wants all the guys to want her. And the price for that is that she has no life. Nothing means anything to her except that.

MG: But at the age of 16 you’re so desperate for an identity.

JK: You are. And if you’re being bombarded by the media that tells you that your worth is tied up in your sexuality…. And that’s the thing about XVI: It’s not just the girls who are taking this in. It’s the guys. They are taught to see girls as sexual beings, not as people. The resistance, the underground in the book, are people that want to see the whole person, but even there, there are problems. And that goes into the second book, Truth, where these guys still are having a hard time because they are bombarded with the same messages that the girls are. You’re still looking at that girl as somebody who’s a sexual being or needs to be protected from rape, from being exploited. That’s a thing our society is currently grappling with. Teens are like the opening flower, if you will. What is it that you’re fertilizing them with? It’s ingrained in our society already. Honestly, when I was writing this, I was kind of despairing. We’re so close already.

MG: XVI came out in 2011 and Truth in 2012. As I was checking all the comments from your loyal readers on various book sites, they were saying, ‘There’s got to be more!’ It’s clear to everybody. Well?

JK: I know that Nina hasn’t left my brain because she keeps showing up saying, ‘Well, what if you did this? What if I went here?’ So, I have been fleshing out some ideas for a third book. It may be more of a companion book than a sequel. A couple of years will lapse.

MG: A website called Parental Book Reviews, which ranks books for teens, has these categories: Sexual Dialogue — you’re ranked Heavy. Sexual Content — Moderate, with mentions of rape. Profanity — Heavy….

JK: That’s puzzling because, you know, slang changes. I had different words for sex rather than….

MG: Maybe they were projecting: ‘Oh that’s going to be a dirty word in 150 years.’

JK: And it certainly was going to be a dirty word 150 years in the future.

MG: Violence — Moderate to Heavy.

JK: Yes.

MG: And here’s a catch-all, Other Notable Ideas — the site writes that guys have a say in girls’ pregnancies, whether or not they can have an abortion, etc. I don’t know if that’s a problem in the site’s view or what. Have you had any problems with censorship or banning?

JK: Not that I’m aware of.

MG: High schools are assigning your books.

JK: Yes. Some of my biggest fans are teachers and librarians. People that love it, love it. And people that hate it, hate it. All you have to do is go to Amazon and the first review is one star and that person willfully chose to misunderstand everything that I was talking about.

MG: You put your stuff out there, you take your chances.

JK: And it’s not yours anymore. You write it for yourself, but when you send it out there, it’s like sending your kid to kindergarten — you can’t make everybody in the classroom like him. And you can’t stand over the other kids in the classroom and say, ‘You, What do you mean you don’t like my kid?’ Same way with the books.

MG: When I write, there’s always someone I’m writing to. Do you do that?

JK: No.

MG: It’s not the same person all the time. It’s different people. I pick a face of someone I know and esteem and say ‘I’m telling you this story.’

JK: Oh, cool. That’s very cool. I don’t do that.

Nina’s story? I’ll tell you how she showed up. One day, into my head just popped a picture of a punk rock girl. Spiky hair. Different colors. Miniskirt. Lots of bracelets with studs on ‘em. Heavy eye makeup. Boots. She’s walking down a city street and she trips over a homeless man and just keeps on walking. She’s got her earbuds in, you know? And then she stops and she turns around and she looks at him and she thinks, ‘I have to do something for him. I have to acknowledge him. I cannot just leave him there any more.’ That was just like this little picture that popped into my head for five seconds.

MG: A personality came out of that vision.

JK: Right. Here’s this person.

That year I decided to do National Novel Writing Month, which is November. You get 30 days to write 50,000 words. One of their catch phrases is No Plot? No Problem. All you need is a main character and a location. I had a main character and I had a location — but it was New York City and I don’t know New York City. I’ve only been there once. I did live in Chicago for five years and I loved it. I turned 16 in Chicago.

MG: You were a high school kid.

JK: Well, I was a high school kid until I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year.

MG: A dropout!

JK: I’m a dropout. Went back and got my GED and I’ve done some college but I made my way with a part of a high school education.

I knew Chicago so I took my character Nina, my little punk rock girl, I sat down and I said, ‘Girl, you’re going to have to tell me your story because I don’t know what it is.’

I started writing. I knew a little bit about who she was; that she was somebody who was no longer comfortable with the status quo.

During the Lotus Festival, you have a wristband on. You walk up and you hold up your hand so that the ushers will see that you have a wristband and you can go in. You don’t have to say a word. So when I started writing this it was the first of November; Lotus had been over for, what, a month? That kind of worked its way into the story. Identification on the wrist – the story evolved from there. I wrote it in 30 days. I had my basic story. And I let it sit for a while and I went back and revised, and revised, and revised. That was 2009. It was just a dream. When I wrote it I said, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’

[At the time, Karr was part of a critique group and had been working on another, unrelated book. She eventually scrapped the other book because it needed too many revisions.]

JK: So, in order to have something to show to my critique partners, I brought them XVI. And they loved it. They were like, ‘This is your book. Start tweaking and tightening it up and making it a book.’ Which I did.

MG: When your critique partners said, for instance, ‘You know, I don’t like this or that,’ how long did it take you not to want to strangle them?

JK: I’m pretty open to just listening and trying to understand from somebody’s else’s point of view.

MG: You don’t take criticism personally?

JK: The gals that I was working with on XVI, we would sit and talk it over: ‘Well, you know. I really don’t get this part,’ or, ‘This doesn’t sound right,’ or, ‘Would she really say that?’ or, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’ When choosing critique partners you have to choose people that you know want you to be better. They’re not your relatives, heaven forbid. Your relatives will read anything and say, ‘Oh my god, this is wonderful!’

I just recently joined a critique group that has some awesome authors in it, some published, some not published. They are hard. Which is good. They’re not lying to me. They want my work to shine and they know it’s not going to shine unless I hear the hard truth about what’s wrong with it. They’re not trying to rewrite it; they’re just saying, ‘This doesn’t work. I stopped reading here. Why are you doing this?’ They’re excellent. I absolutely love them. I don’t get emotional about critiques because I recognize I’m trying to get better. What do they say? If you think you’re a master, you’re not. I don’t think I’m a master. I just want to get better.

MG: What did you read when you were 16?

JK: Oh my! I was reading fantasy, I was really into science fiction for a while. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert. I also was reading Michener. I was reading Ayn Rand. I started reading when I was three. I have an older sister and she could read and I wanted to read. So she taught me how to read. She would read to me and I would figure it out.

I even got my picture on the front page of the Seymour Daily Tribune when I was six years old because I was the youngest kid to go through the summer reading club. Yes. I hadn’t even started first grade yet. I always read. The Seymour Public Library was great. I went through the children’s room by the time I was 12. I had everything in there read. Then I moved on to westerns and mysteries. There really wasn’t a lot of Young Adult fiction back then. I can remember when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I wanted to check out Gone with the Wind. The librarian called my grandmother — I grew up with my grandmother — to make sure it was alright to check the book out to me.

Right now I’m reading all the Inspector Linley mysteries by Elizabeth George. I also am on a kick: I have decided to read biographies of all the presidents of the United States, including Benjamin Harrison, if there’s something for the 21 days that he was in office.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

Curly Little Shirley Explains It All For You

A Luminous American Life ● by Tom Roznowski

 

In a curious way, Shirley Temple’s recent death at 85 resonated with popular culture as much as her famous childhood did. While turning her back completely on Hollywood and serving in far-flung outposts as a U.S. ambassador, Shirley Temple Black somehow managed to avoid both vicious gossip and the public eye. Hiding in plain sight, as it were.

Over the course of the 20th Century, media in various forms came to direct and define fame in ways that have made this type of anonymity virtually impossible. Because her early public career coincided with the emergence of sound movies, Shirley Temple would become the first celebrity for whom chronological aging became a serious inconvenience. Her film career began in 1932, the same year that the venerated vaudeville venue, The Palace in New York City, converted itself to a fulltime movie house. In the depths of the Depression, a quarter could buy you hours of escape in air-conditioned darkness. Standing all of four feet as she tap-danced, sang, and lectured cranky adults, Shirley Temple reminded a suffering nation that daily life could actually contain joy.

As exhausting as her schedule was, starting at age 5 with 16 feature films completed in three years, Shirley Temple achieved nationwide recognition without appearing on the stage. Her filmed performances ran simultaneously in thousands of theaters across the United States multiple times every day with a brand new feature being produced every few months. By the time Shirley Temple blew out the candles on her 10th birthday cake, she had appeared in 40 separate film titles. From 1935 to 1938, she was the top box-office draw in America.

Good thing, too. Because within just two years the American movie-going public would summarily reject this beloved and bankable star for the simple reason that she was no longer a little girl. With the increasing clarity of visual film images and recorded sound during this period, every half-inch of her growth was being notched on the door jamb. Fox Studios, anticipating that their investment had a fixed time signature, had altered her birth date by a year.

From today’s perspective, we can see that even as sound film multiplied access and more accurately replicated reality for audiences eager for escape, it also encased film stars and their human personas in amber. And all of this happened within the average American life span of Shirley Temple Black. The first Oscar for Sound Recording was awarded at the first Academy Awards ceremony after her birth. In 1932, just as she was getting in front of a camera, sound mixing was introduced. Then she sang “The Good Ship Lollipop” and “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” performances so definitive no one else even bothered. She held her own dancing on with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Not backwards in high heels but rather down a staircase in Mary Janes.

Shirley Temple’s popularity began to wane even before she reached adolescence. As you might expect, it all started with some bad decisions made for her by adults. She was initially the choice for the lead role in The Wizard of Oz in 1939, but Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox Pictures, refused to loan her to MGM.  He was very confident about Shirley’s upcoming release the following year; a picture you’ve likely never seen called The Blue Bird.

It became the first of four consecutive flops for three different studios.  Shirley Temple would then marry at age 17. A measure of just how completely she had vanished from the public eye was the fact that her subsequent divorce at 21 did very little damage to either her reputation or her career. Two weeks after the decree was finalized, she married Charles Black – very wealthy and not an actor. Then, poof! Even for the still curious, she was gone. Now she could finally smoke a cigarette in peace.

As film and sound recording became more technically sophisticated in the 1930s, screen characters were presented in ways that defied the passage of time, allowing audiences to permanently project their deepest fantasies. In 1955, popular culture would freeze Marilyn Monroe’s white dress in mid-air as she stood over a subway grate. This, and her death at age 36, conveniently banished the thought that she would have been nearing ninety when the dress was finally auctioned in 2011. Its entire reputation was based on a ten second movie scene. The winning bid was 5.6 million dollars.

The great blues singer, Bessie Smith, had been born just a generation earlier and also never saw 50. She at least had the advantage of leaving her best performances in the present moment. Legend has it that her voice was capable of putting some audience members into a hypnotic trance that drew them like zombies towards the stage. Afterwards, her scratchy Victrola recordings became sepia postcards from the trip. Already been there, thanks.

Over the course of the 20th Century and accelerating every decade, technology has narrowed the breadth of our imaginations. With digital formats in sound and film absorbing more and more creative presence, the work of interpretation is now increasingly being done for us. Illusion created in print or with black and white film can gently guide the senses and the emotions. But as every shade of color and every bit of detail is filled in, illusion is becoming a thrill with diminished impact. The effects extend far beyond the artistic. While it’s true that peaches imported from Chile are camera-ready and consumer-friendly, the process of transporting them across a hemisphere in real time comes at a high cost: It turns out they don’t taste anything like peaches.

This slow fade from the imaginative and the sensory began long before Shirley Agnes Temple drew a breath, yet one could argue the process took a pronounced leap with her first flop. The Blue Bird started production at 20th Century Fox Studios in the wake of MGM’s astounding success with their own film adaptation of a popular children’s tale. The production looked good on paper, at least in the contracts and publicity releases. While Judy Garland was a discovery, Shirley Temple was an icon.

The reasons for the failure of The Blue Bird now seem so plain with the perspective of time. Stark reality collided head on with advancing technology: Shirley Temple at 12 and in Technicolor. Her hair was no longer curled in ringlets. Her pouts were temperamental rather than charming. Her talents were suddenly considered pedestrian rather than precocious. At a time when Bessie Smith’s hypnotized subjects still walked the earth, the movie star was no longer worth the cheap price of admission. It’s the oldest vaudeville adage of all: Never follow a kid act.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

 

Pull quote

The slow fade from the imaginative and the sensory began long before Shirley Temple drew a breath, yet one could argue the process took a pronounced leap shortly after she blew out the candles on her 10th birthday cake.

Magic Steeped In The Real

The Legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez ● by Will Healey

 

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in April at the age of 87, the literary world lost a giant.  The man best known for his 1967 masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude and the literary genre with which his name became synonymous, magic realism, left in his wake a trove of novels, short stories and essays that simultaneously communicate timeless truths of life and evoke the mysteries of the supernatural.

Garcia Marquez, from Colombia, was the most celebrated Latin American writer of his era, and one of the most revered writers of the last fifty years.  So towering were his works, that when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Letters said “Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance.” Writer William Kennedy famously called One Hundred Years of Solitude  the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Telling a friend that I was finally going to read that novel after Garcia Marquez’s passing, he said, “it’s the history of the world told through the story of one family.”

Garcia Marquez started his career as a journalist, but gravitated to fiction in his thirties.  He had many celebrated works besides One Hundred Years of Solitude – his novel about a 50-year unrequited love, Love in the Time of Cholera; the short story collection The Leaf Storm; a tale about the epic reign of a fictional Caribbean dictator, The Autumn of the Patriarch; and News of a Kidnapping, a non-fiction book about a series of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.

Garcia Marquez’s works were very much influenced by the times in which he lived, and he was unapologetically political.  He counted among his friends Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, and was outspoken in his disdain for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  Jonathan Kandell, in a piece for The New York Times marking the death of the great author, wrote that Garcia Marquez’s work “sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence.” Kandell went on to quote Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:  “Poets and beggars,” Garcia Marquez said, “musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination.  For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

In some literary circles, however, Garcia Marquez was criticized for the fantastical elements in his writing, something Salman Rushdie (on whom Garcia Marquez’s work had a great influence), took issue with in a New York Times piece written shortly after the author’s death. Rushdie wrote that the fictional village of Macondo, the backdrop for the agonies and ecstasies of seven generations of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude (modeled after Garcia Marquez’s north coastal Colombian birthplace, Aracataca), was similar to William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.  Rushdie used the comparison to argue that Garcia Marquez, like Faulkner, created real characters inhabiting a real world.

“The trouble with the term “magic realism,” is that when people say or hear it, they are really only hearing or saying half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism,” Rushdie wrote.  He goes on to say that if magic realism were just “magic,” then it wouldn’t have much effect on the reader.  Because anything is possible, the stakes are lower.  But, Rushdie says, when the magic is “rooted in the real, and is brought in to supplement the real, that’s when the fun starts.

Rushdie describes a famous scene from the novel, wherein a character dies from a single gunshot and a trickle of his blood leaves his house and serpentines up and down through the streets of Macondo until it finally stops at his mother’s feet.  According to Rushdie, the passage “reads as high tragedy,” because the impossibility of the blood’s purpose-fueled behavior, juxtaposed against the plausible event of a mother learning of her son’s death, takes on a higher, even spiritual meaning.  As Rushdie puts it, “The real, by addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force.  It becomes more real, not less.”

In another notable scene from the novel, the death of the patriarch of the Buendia clan, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is marked by a steady rain of tiny yellow flowers, so many that the next day “the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.”  Jose Arcadio Buendia led the expedition that founded Macondo, and was a polymath of boundless energy.  His unquenchable thirst for knowledge ultimately drives him mad, but the solemn poetry of the raining flowers suggests that the heavens were paying tribute to a man who gave everything to try to advance the lot of his people.

True to Rushdie’s sentiments that the power of Marquez’s work lay in the real, I’m struck that the passage that had the greatest effect on me in One Hundred Years of Solitude didn’t contain anything fantastic or unexplainable.  Albeit tragic, masterfully written and heart-wrenching, this passage simply depicts a man’s final moments.

“On the way to the cemetery, under the persistent drizzle, Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was breaking out on the horizon.  His nostalgia disappeared with the mist and left an immense curiosity in its place.  Only when they ordered him to put his back to the wall did Arcadio see Rebeca, with wet hair and a pink flowered dress, opening wide the door.  He made an effort to get her to recognize him.  And Rebeca did take a casual look toward the wall and was paralyzed with stupor, barely able to react and wave good-bye to Arcadio.  Arcadio answered her the same way.  At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that Melquiades had chanted and he heard the lost steps of Santa Sofia de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils of the corpse of Remedios.  “Oh, God damn it!” he managed to think.  “I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios.” Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life.  The captain gave the order to fire.  Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.  “Bastards!” he shouted.  “Long live the Liberal Party!”

Marquez/Castro

Marquez (L) And Fidel Castro

Garcia Marquez did not invent the genre of magic realism, but he certainly popularized it.  Countless writers today employ it in their work- Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Haruki Murakami, and Toni Morrison, to name a few.  His influence carries over into other media as well.  Watching the film Pan’s Labyrinth, which juxtaposes a strange world of mythical creatures against the harsh realities of the Spanish Civil War, it’s hard to imagine Mexican director Guillermo del Toro wasn’t influenced by Garcia Marquez.  Or take the famous raining frogs sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia, which depicted the mysterious intersections of seemingly disparate lives. What makes Magnolia’s famous sequence work isn’t that the events in the film are so coincidental that, sure, frogs falling from the sky isn’t so far fetched; it’s that the characters that are all strangely connected are so real to us, and the dramas that play out in their storylines so human, that the frogs falling from the sky is an inexplicable moment of wonder that somehow rings true – Garcia Marquez’s personal recipe for successful, affecting magic realism.

Just four months on from his passing, and 47 years after the release of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still far too early to fully measure the scope of the author’s impact on the world. But back in April, when it became known that Garcia Marquez had finally succumbed to complications from lymphatic cancer and dementia, I wonder how many of his admirers checked outside to see that there weren’t yellow flowers raining from the sky.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

The 38th Annual 4th St. Festival of the Arts & Crafts

● by Colleen Wells

 

Labor Day calls for cook-outs and a long weekend to enjoy the waning summer. For Bloomington residents it means something more. Labor Day Weekend ushers in the Fourth Street Festival of the Arts and Fine Crafts, an event coordinated by local artists. With roots stemming from a discussion between two local potters, the inaugural Fourth Street Festival was held in 1977 with the goal of showcasing local talent. The event has since blossomed to accommodate a variety of both greater Bloomington area artisans and those from around the country. Nearly 120 artists from states as far as New York and Florida will participate.

Now in its 38th year, the weekend’s event attracts over 40,000 visitors. It will run from 10:00ama to 6:00pm on Saturday, August 30th, and 10:00am to 5:00pm on Sunday at Fourth & Grant Streets. Artists representing a variety of mediums including printmaking, wood, leather, photography, fiber, glass and ceramics will display and sell their work.

Wendy Newman of Moab, Utah, has participated in numerous festivals for twenty-five years with her handcrafted, contemporary jewelry and was a juror for this year’s event. She spoke of the advantages of art fairs created by artists. “In my experience the shows that artists run are juried more fairly and of a higher quality than other shows.”

Another factor in the event’s success is the willingness of the artists to promote their own work. Bloomington resident and contemporary jewelry artist, Marilyn Greenwood, has been exhibiting her work at the show since 1990. She has her work on display at By Hand gallery, but is able to show a wider variety and her newest work at the festival. Through her marketing efforts the artist stated she “draws on people from Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati and Louisville.”

There will be other attractions including a music stage with bands offering tunes ranging from classical to blues. The kidszone will provide hands on art opportunities for children, and there will be additional community booths. All of the ancillary events run through the course of both days.

The Spoken Word Stage presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington begins each day at 10:30a.m. with writers reading from several genres. Each presentation lasts a half hour. Since joining the festival in 2011, this addition has been both popular and unique. Tony Brewer, Executive Director for the Spoken Word Stage and Chair of the Bloomington Writer’s Guild, said, “To my knowledge 4th Street is the only arts festival in Indiana that offers a dedicated spoken word stage. Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, and many many others around the country have for years, and I have looked to them as a model for how ours might work.”

New this year is an installation located at Fourth Street between Kirkwood and Dunn. The piece is constructed of plywood with a waffle-like structure held together by friction without any bolts or screws. It was created in a workshop with mechanical engineering students at IUPUI-Columbus. Instructor Jonathan Racek, a Bloomington architect with a focus on sustainability and digital fabrication who teaches interior design classes at Indiana University, had spoken with colleagues about building a set piece for a fashion show put on by IU students. The arch was created with 3D software and fabricated on a CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) router which Racek said is “like a robotic cutter.” The creation is approximately 8 feet wide, 8.5 feet tall, and 3 feet deep.

Of being tasked with making the piece for the fashion show, Racek said, “We really weren’t sure what that was going to be.” Soon to be exhibited at the Fourth Street Festival, the structure simply called “the arch,” will be at home alongside many other creative pieces.

Whether you are a regular visitor of the 4th street Festival, or plan to attend for the first time, you are likely to find something that resonates. It may be an intricate piece of metal jewelry, or a painting that speaks to you, but the 4th Street Festival is a place where artists and art are appreciated.

Brewer stated that the Poetry On Demand portion of the Spoken Word Stage “offers festival goers an opportunity to interact directly with artists in the act of creation.” This fits with the organizers of the festival’s vision of community involvement.

Commenting on shows where a dedicated staff works closely with the community, juror Newman stated, “These shows are a labor of love for the people who put them on and focused more on the art which is a treasure to have.”

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

The Cult Of Faux Reality

Writer-director Ti West and his film, The Sacrament, are coming to the IU Cinema as part of the Diabolique International Film Festival ● by Max Weinstein

 

[The Diabolique International Film Festival is a celebration of independent horror, science fiction, and dark fantasy film. In its eighth year, DIFF will take place from September 18-20 at the IU Cinema.

As a film festival, DIFF acts as a platform for independent genre films and filmmakers that work to explore possibilities outside of studio constraints. The DIFF Academic Symposium also aims to generate discussion about independent and alternative horror. The horror genre has circulated for years through alternative means including foreign film, art film, independent film, and tonal intersections with a variety of other genres; these are the alternatives DIFF celebrates. The scope of the DIFF symposium is broad yet specific: to discuss the possibilities and future of horror film, or films that intersect with horror, outside of those produced by major studios, exploring the complexities and potential of the genre when unrestricted by Hollywood limitations. For more on DIFF visit diaboliquefilmfestival.com

A version of this article was originally published in Diabolique magazine.]

“In a perfect world, I would have done an eight-part documentary mini-series about Jonestown,” Ti West explains when considering what could have been made in lieu of The Sacrament, his latest film that, with some struggle, he resolves to describe as a “sort of new media type thing.”

The Sacrament is a great horror film ⎯ a film whose media meshing invokes a necessary discourse on the representation of reality in a genre designed to shock and affect. West’s most complete and ambitious work to date deftly interweaves a multiplicity of techniques, aesthetics and subgenres to tell the story of the mysterious Eden Parish, a People’s Temple-esque cult that becomes the focal point of The Sacrament’s  film-within-a-film fictional investigative documentary.

Kentucker Audley co-stars as Patrick, a photo journalist who gains access to Eden Parish, intending to meet his sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz), who has been a member of the commune since being taken in for drug therapy by its leader, Charles Anderson Reed (Gene Jones). In tow are two of Patrick’s colleagues from Vice Media, Sam  (AJ Bowen) and Jake (Joe Swanberg). As Reed, the enigmatic leader of Eden Parish known to his followers simply as “Father,” Gene Jones delivers a performance whose potency is the catalyst for The Sacrament’s blurring of ethical journalism and individual moralism; Sam unnerves viewers when he tells Jake, on-screen, that while he wouldn’t choose to live a life at Eden Parish, his immersion in its daily goings-on are allowing him to actually “dig it.”

“That line is a big thesis line of the movie,” West asserts. “What I wanted to show when they got there and saw this place was that it’s weird — it’s definitely weird — but, ‘Hey, if they wanna live like this, if nothing’s wrong, who am I to say otherwise?’ People think that if you’re in a cult, 24/7, you’re just a lunatic every minute of every day. Hopefully the first half of the movie can help educate people to a certain extent, to where they see these people and go, ‘Oh. I understand why they’re here. I don’t wanna do that. But it makes sense, what they’re saying.’ [In] the big interview with Father, it’s all there. Everything he’s saying doesn’t sound so bad.”

Parallels between Father’s diatribes against America’s social, political and economic status quo and Jim Jones’ rationale for coaxing Jonestown members to commit mass “revolutionary suicide” are of primary concern to West in his efforts to school modern audiences on doomsday cults’ hive mentality. “Ideologically, everything he says should make perfect sense to everybody,” West says of Father’s delusional hijacking of serious systemic ills like imperialism, racism, or homelessness. “Like, ‘We shouldn’t have poor people!’ ‘I agree.’ ‘We shouldn’t have sick people!’ ‘I agree.’ He’s saying such basic things. Now, if you’re in a very desperate situation that you can’t improve, and a guy comes along and says, ‘Come with me and I can make your life better,’ you’d try it. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But to get it to work, you stick with it. For a while it is better than the life you had before. But the bigger that group gets, as always, the megalomaniac who’s in charge starts to pervert it. The guy promises everything — great — gives you some of it, and once you’re so deep in, you realize it’s not all there and there’s nothing you can do about it, because your life has become so insular. You’re too in it now.”

The name Eden Parish in and of itself appropriates biblical connotations to slyly suggest not only the “new beginning” Father promises its members, but also the eradication of one’s sense of self that his benevolent-seeming brainwashing gradually creates, in the name of a “fresh start.” West’s voice grows agitated when explaining Father’s theft of the cult’s members’ identity, as if arguing with an imaginary person whose perspective is noxiously contrarian to that of his own: “Even when you go back to Jonestown, it’s like: ‘I wouldn’t have taken the poison!’ How? How would you have been the one person, when everyone you know — your friends, family, babies — are dying around you? You’re living in a work camp in the jungle in 1978. How do you get out of it? That takes a strong person to go ‘No thanks,’ and walk out of there and risk being killed. It wasn’t really a choice. If you’re sitting there and your whole family’s dying around you, you’re gonna walk through the jungle and hopefully find a plane with no money and no passport, get back to America and then just be homeless with no family or friends? That’s not a good option. What they don’t realize is that all that stuff was taken away from them by someone in charge, and they thought they were offering it up to him to have a better life. At first, it was that for a lot of people. But once you get so deep in, it’s not easy to get out.”

In a perverse way, the insularity to which West refers actually facilitates an unconventional home space, and he is intrigued by reading The Sacrament, if not explicitly as a Home Invasion film, at least as demonstrative of its definitive tropes. As the crew’s documentary unfolds, Father’s paranoid warnings about their posing an “outsider” threat culminate in suspicion, derangement, and later, violence, among his constructed family subjected to such propagation. “If you look at it from the Eden Parish side of things,” he says, “they’re trying to get Patrick down there because they’ve got rich parents. If his sister can convince him to stay and get more money, they can keep doing what they’re doing. They didn’t know these [film crew] guys were coming, and they’re like, ‘Oh, shit…’ They’re rolling with it. They can’t just send him away, because people will tell stories about it. So they’re trying their best to deal with, essentially, a home invasion event. It’s not like someone knocking down someone’s door with an axe, but it is these people that they don’t want in their community. They’re trying to spin it, and Father is trying to stay one step ahead of them and ‘work’ this. And they just can’t. The Sacrament isn’t really a home invasion movie, but if you think about it from the characters’ perspective, yes — these journalists came in and started this snowball rolling that unraveled everything.”

The distinctly southern drawl of Father reeks of the television evangelical huckster type who might try to convince you that masturbation distracts from “holding hands with God,” or that heavy metal music is the cause of all suicides (without a hint of self-awareness). The Sacrament’s characterization of this religious fanaticism as geographically bound to red states like Mississippi, where Father says he was born, is a lightning rod for reactionaries, and was consequential during the making of The Sacrament, when the time came for West to receive permission to shoot from local authorities. “We were gonna shoot the movie in Charleston, South Carolina and we did not. They would not give us the tax credit because of the content of the movie,” West reveals of his location scouting process. “To get the tax incentive, you had to get the content approved, and they didn’t want anything to do with it — which is a shame, because that’s a lot of money for South Carolina. It’s a lot of money for people whose army lives just ended. All those crew would have come on to our movie and they would have kept a lot of people in business. They were like, ‘We don’t like the content of your movie. You can’t shoot here.’ So we left. At one point they called us and were like, ‘We’re actually gonna overturn that,’ but it was too late. Then we moved to Georgia where it was not an issue. What’s great about Georgia is they went, ‘Come on down.’”

In terms of its unique status as a movie of technological identity crisis, West himself is contradictory when breaking down how The Sacrament can, and ought, to be received. “I don’t consider it a found-footage movie,” he states. “But found-footage is sort of helpful, because it’s like ‘Oh, I’m gonna watch a movie with a camera in it.’ It’s not like we dug up this tape and this is what was ‘found’ and previously shot. The characters made a documentary. Some point of view is still in it, because the documentary being made is so shocking and so unbelievable, but it was never meant to be like, ‘Thank God we had these baby monitors and surveillance cameras in the corner of the room so we could catch this footage!’ What the main characters do for a living is make documentaries. You don’t call a Christopher Guest movie a found-footage movie, but they’ve been doing that forever; it’s basically a fake documentary. But if you call The Sacrament a mockumentary, it’s wildly insensitive. You can’t call it that. It’s in this kind of no-man’s land, which is a nightmare when you’re marketing the movie. But it also made it easier for me as a filmmaker, because found-footage movies are sloppy on purpose; they have to be for it to feel authentic. So since there’s an on-camera guy and a director of photography, they could actually shoot the movie to make it look good. For me, it was great to be able to do interesting compositions, shoot people and not have the movie be like someone’s video camera that they’re dropping on the ground every two seconds.”

No consolation prize of one spared innocent human life is delivered in an historically grounded, inevitable train-wreck such as this. Forced to bear witness the fabricated deaths of a cult of faux-reality, there is an ever-present sense that the destruction of family, identity, belief systems or basic humanity defies comprehension, even amidst the modernity of our information age.

A lacuna in a philosophy too committed to authorship when writing and directing a film that reflects Jim Jones’ murder of actual human beings, however, is that overt stylization can sensationalize its narrative’s tragic nature. “This shouldn’t be a ‘fun’ horror movie,” West asserts, expounding upon his conscious decision to nix the supernatural elements of his previous genre outings. “There shouldn’t be a ‘clapping scene’ where someone dies in this movie. It should be confrontational. It’s not just reduced to ‘Eh, drink the Kool-Aid.’”

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

DIFF 2014: When, What, Where

The Diabolique International Film Festival, September 18-20 at the IU Cinema

 

Thursday, September 18:

9:30 pm ⎯ DIFF kicks off with a special screening of the award winning film Proxy, directed by Indiana native Zack Parker.

Friday, September 19:

● 3pm ⎯ A Conversation with Ti West with Q&A

● 6:30pm ⎯ The Sacrament  (Ti West hosts)

● 9:30 pm ⎯  Ti West’s The Innkeepers

● 11:59 pm ⎯ Ti West’s The House of the Devil

Saturday, September 20:

● 8am ⎯ Roundtable: Diabolique International Film Festival Academic Symposium 2014

The DIFF Academic Symposium will consist of three horror-centered roundtables on Saturday morning: two led by local horror scholars, and a third led by independent horror directors Ti West and Zack Parker.

Noon-1:30pm ⎯ Screening Block #1

A program of shorts including Zombies 4Kids 

● 2-4:30pm ⎯ Screening Block #2

A program of shorts including Possessed Forklift of Death  

● 4-5:30pm ⎯ Screening Block #3

A program of shorts including The Pride of Strathmoor

● 6-7:40pm ⎯ Screening Block #4

A program of shorts including The Carriage or: Dracula & My Mother 

8-9:40pm ⎯ Screening Block #5

A program of shorts including Extreme Pinocchio 

● 10-11:40pm ⎯ Screening  Block #6

A program of shorts including Franky and the Ant (Dir. Billy Hayes, USA)

● 11:30pm ⎯ After Hours VIP Party and Awards Presentation at Scholars Inn

Visiting filmmakers are invited to join us at our After Hours VIP Party and Awards Presentation at Scholars Inn, a 150-year-old historic mansion. Since our first year in 2007, its dual fireplaces and huge outdoor decks have provided the perfect backdrop for our guests and visiting filmmakers to network, have fun, and share their experiences.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

Films: Boyhood

Cinema In the Present Tense ● by Brandon Walsh

 

The uncredited main character of Richard Linklater’s latest film Boyhood is time, and time will tell. Shot over 12 years with the same actors, the audience is invited to watch both the characters and story evolve over time. In the spirit of the longitudinal films of Antoine Doinel, the Up documentary series, and Linklater’s own Before… trilogy, Boyhood compresses time and human experience in a way previously unseen to the art form.

The film is chaptered by various markers of growing up, often without the broader narrative explanation to be expected from mainstream cinema. When we see a young Mason pour mustard on the hot dog his dad bought for him at a baseball game, we aren’t explicitly told what it means to him, but the seemingly mundane focus helps to explain the bond with his father as the film progresses. The joy of Boyhood comes with watching seeds like this grow, in a way that the story allows itself to be told by unfolding in new and interesting ways somehow avoiding most audience-pandering cause/effect conventions. In doing so Linklater places trust in the audience’s own humanity to decide which moments to attribute importance, the very same logic that goes for one’s own life. As a result, there are numerous ways to identify with the film (nostalgic/prospective as a parent/child), and all are valid.

Archibald MacLeish writes at the end of “Ars Poetica” that a poem, “should not mean/But be,” a notion meant to match the fluid subjectivity of life. The argument could be made that more films have been employing a mode of “visual poetry,” leaving more elliptical moments meant to question our relationship with time rather than a straightforward narrative payoff across scenes. Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder come to mind as two modern examples of narrative films with such moments, albeit with a stronger regard for imagery over character. A thesis of Boyhood could be that as a kid, things just sort of happen to you, and that we’re all thrown into life without much guidance of how to do it right, left to stare at the clouds. Mason’s boyhood vulnerability drifts away with his increasing willingness to flow with the inexplicable. He begins to trust others, depend on himself, love and reciprocate, consider the consequence of his actions, gaining the qualities of a well-rounded adult.

As Mason matures, so does the film itself, leaving plot-centric scenes for more focused philosophical conversations, without the traditional motive of sequential action. The film’s aspirations are lofty, but reaches them by avoiding metaphor-laden humanitarian commentary well recognized in the Oscar-winning canon of great film. Late in the film, Mason talks with a young woman who works with kids approaching their “awkward years,” and the reality hits that we’ve watched Mason live through his. Life is presented as no more or less than a series of events, but more than the sum of its seconds.

For those who have been following Linklater’s filmography, the film’s reclining structure will come as little surprise. However, the later scenes serve a deeper purpose. Whereas a film like Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are encourages the audience to interpret the events with a child character’s limited perspective, Linklater invites a broad understanding of childhood and adolescence, one that recognizes the nuanced effects of parents and environment on a growing mind, but also understands the individual can’t entirely be defined by his/her surroundings. Therein lies the onward-explorative spirit of Boyhood, a film with as much ineffable heart and consciousness as its characters.

At its very best, film packages the experience of consciousness into digestible entertainment. It’s phenomenology made tangible, a personal study that invites a deeper appreciation of the impermanence of life. Time survives in retrospect, but it only moves forward. In expressing this through Linklater’s production, we’re reminded the death of time is life in the ongoing present. Much like the end of Linklater’s Before Midnight, the film doesn’t end as much as it stops presenting itself to us on a screen. The rest is on us.

[Brandon Walsh works for Facets, whose Cinémathèque is an independent art house theater in Chicago that screens international film targeted to younger audiences.]

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

 

IU Cinema Fall Preview

● by Craig J. Clark

 

The Indiana University Cinema’s Fall 2014 program book will be out within the next few weeks, but in the meantime, The Ryder has been given a sneak peek at what’s on the docket for the next four months, courtesy of director Jon Vickers.

“We are very excited about the IU Cinema’s fall program this year,” Vickers says. “There is definitely plenty from everyone, from the casual movie-lover to the most discerning cinephile. We will be celebrating the 30th Anniversary some of the most iconic films of 1984, like Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles, and This Is Spinal Tap, the 40th anniversary of one of the scariest movies of all time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the 10th anniversary of the film Kinsey.”

Vickers promises that the entire season will be online before the first of September, but visitors to the Cinema the weekend before Labor Day will witness the kickoff of three of its regular film series – Underground, City Lights, and Midnight Movies.

The Underground series gets off to a chilling start on Friday, August 29, with 1973’s Ganja & Hess, which doubles as the first of three films in a series entitled “Blaxploitation Horror of the 1970s.” A most unusual vampire film, in the sense that the v-word is never once spoken in it, Ganja & Hess was written and directed by Bill Gunn, who had previously scripted Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, and gave Duane Jones his only starring role outside of Night of the Living Dead. He plays a renowned anthropologist who takes on a neurotic assistant (played by Gunn) who stabs him with a ceremonial dagger and kills himself. Jones is far from dead, though, and he now has a taste for blood which he satiates by raiding blood banks (prefiguring Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive by four decades) and killing prostitutes. Then Gunn’s wife (Marlene Clark) comes looking for him and eventually marries Jones, who turns her and initiates her in the fine art of body disposal. Only then does he seriously contemplate what “till death do you part” means.

As envisioned by Gunn, Ganja & Hess has a very strong religious component, represented by bookend scenes at the church of a firebrand reverend (Sam Waymon) who’s also Jones’s part-time chauffeur. Faced with such an idiosyncratic film, distributors responded by cutting it to ribbons and releasing it under more exploitable titles like Black Vampire, Blood Couple and Double Possession, but the print being screened by the Cinema is a 35mm restoration of Gunn’s director’s cut, which makes it a veritable must-see. Incidentally, the two other films in the Blaxploitation Horror series, which picks back up in October, are 1976’s J.D.’s Revenge, and 1972’s Blacula, the film that set the cycle in motion and which will, appropriately enough, be shown on Halloween.

Other screenings in the Underground Film Series include the experimental documentaries The Great Flood and All Vows, which filmmaker Bill Morrison will be present for, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial final film, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Belgian filmmaker Harry Kümel’s Malpertius, made the same year as his cult vampire film Daughters of Darkness, and an evening of shorts by experimental filmmaker Warren Sonbert. Those looking for something a little more accessible, though, will want to keep an eye on its companion series, City Lights.

First up is the Jacques Demy musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is being screened on Saturday, August 30. Made in 1964, it’s a frothy concoction in which every line of dialogue is sung, and the performances by Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo as two young lovers kept apart by circumstances beyond their control are totally endearing. (To go with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the Cinema is screening another Demy musical, 1967’s The Young Girls of Roquefort, along with 1961’s West Side Story as part of a two-film tribute to triple-threat George Chakiris.)

The remainder of the City Lights series includes the work of such notable director/star pairings as Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich (1930’s Morocco), Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas (1957’s Paths of Glory), Alfred Hitchock and Joseph Cotten (1943’s Shadow of a Doubt), and Arthur Penn and Dustin Hoffman (1970’s Little Big Man). Then there’s the post-Halloween double feature of Mad Love and The Raven, both from 1935, featuring horror icons Peter Lorre, Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi. One of the highlights of the semester, though, is likely going to be November’s twin screenings of Buster Keaton’s 1926 silent The General, presented in collaboration with the Jacobs School of Music, with a newly commissioned score by IU alumnus Andrew Simpson and live orchestral accompaniment.

The Midnight Movies series only pops up in the fall, but it tends to feature some of the most adventurous films that the Cinema screens all year. First out of the gate, on Friday, August 29, is Prince’s film debut Purple Rain. Co-written, directed and edited by Albert Magnoli, the 1984 film stars His Purpleness as Prince-like musician The Kid, who fronts a band called The Revolution and is in direct competition with Morris Day, lead singer for The Time, for supremacy in the Minneapolis music scene. They also come into conflict over aspiring singer/dancer Apollonia Kotero, who hooks up with The Kid first but is actively wooed by Day to be in his new girl group. Meanwhile, The Kid has what could charitably be called a difficult home life and a strained relationship with his abusive father, who is nevertheless a brilliant pianist/composer. How much of this correlates to Prince’s actual biography I couldn’t say, but the film’s main saving grace is, of course, the soundtrack, which opens strong with the one-two punch of “Let’s Go Crazy” and The Time’s “Jungle Love,” and closes with blistering live performances of the title song and “I Would Die 4 U.”

Also getting the midnight-screening treatment is 1976’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which continues the Cinema’s tradition of showing at least one X-rated film a semester. This one, a “porno chic” updating of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, is the work of director Radley Metzger, who also made 1974’s Score, which was screened in the spring as part of the “Queer Disorientations” series. Other films in the series include Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (their second giallo homage following 2009’s Amer), and Alex Cox’s Repo Man, which – like Purple Rain – is pulling double duty as part of a film series entitled “1984 Revisited.” (Look for a more in-depth article about that next month.)

“Many more filmmakers will be presenting their work in the Cinema,” Vickers says, “including Josephine Decker, Natalia Almada, and Polish master Krzysztof Zanussi, to name a few. There are also additional, very exciting guests that will be announced before September 1.” Sounds like the makings of a cinephile’s dream to me.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

Deer Park’s Americana Music

Howlin’ Brothers to Kick Off Series ● by Chris Lynch

 

Deer Park Manor, the site of many Bloomington weddings, will inaugurate an Americana Music Series on August 31 with the Howlin’ Brothers, a trio from Nashville, Tennessee (pictured above). Bloomington inventor and broadcast mogul Sarkes Tarzian, who contributed to the development of FM radio and color television, built the manor in the 1950s, and it has operated as a banquet facility since 1999.

Those who have walked the beautiful grounds and gardens understand why it was a fitting place for Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon to stay on their visits to Bloomington—and now its beauty can be enjoyed while taking in great music. According to Angela Backstrom, who is promoting the series, “The venue is in the outdoor courtyard, under a tent, at the lovely manor. There will be some tables and lots of chairs available, and there is a nice slate dance floor for those so inclined.”

Backstrom says that the series defines “Americana” very broadly. “Americana is a large range of music—folk, blues, country, alt-country, singer/songwriter, old-time, bluegrass, newgrass, string band, folk rock, indie, and more.” Backstrom feels that this kind of music in this unique setting will allow the manor to carve out a niche, offering something “that is currently somewhat underrepresented in Bloomington.” Wishing to differentiate itself from the classical music and club scenes, Deer Park Manor is offering “a family oriented, high quality scenic and sonic experience unlike anything else in town,” she says.

The Howlin’ Brothers, whose music combines influences from most of the range of Americana that Backstrom describes, will start the series with a bang. Ian Craft, one of the “brothers,” describes the trio as a string band. “We love blues and great songs,” he says. “We adapt them and perform them with banjo, fiddle, guitar, and upright bass, so to some it may seem like bluegrass—which isn’t wrong—but we also incorporate several styles from Cajun to country and anything else we run into that we dig.”

The trio has come a long way from when they first started working together. The three met in central New York while studying classical music at Ithaca College. “We were all at the school of music learning about different things,” recalls Craft. “Jared and Ben were studying guitar and recording engineering, and I was a percussionist. We met in a recording session—Jared was recording my steel drum band. We became great friends and started learning a lot of folk and bluegrass tunes.”

They learned to play a lot of instruments too. Craft plays banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and kick-drum; Jared Green plays guitar, harmonica, and piano; and Ben Plasse holds it all down on the upright bass. All three contribute vocals, trading off the melody to whomever wrote the song.

For the concert at the manor, the group will perform many original tunes from their commercial albums. Howl, released in 2013, peaked at number six on the Americana Music radio chart. That year they also recorded The Sun Studio Session, the recording of which is documented in a PBS series called The Sun Studio Sessions. Their stop in Bloomington is part of a national tour promoting their third album, called Trouble, which appeared in April.

Their set list will feature lots of other songs too. “We’ll play a full range of music from the new album as well as traditional tunes and other timely classics,” says Craft.

The Howlin’ Brothers’ stop at the manor will also feature some local talent. Bloomington singer-songwriter Jacob Latham will open the evening with an hour-long set at 7pm. At just 19, Latham is already an accomplished performer who has played clubs across the country. His rich and grainy baritone voice perfectly suits his folksy guitar style, mandolin picking, and Dylan-esque harmonica riffs, and will be a wonderful introduction to an evening of Americana.

[If you’re interested in learning about upcoming acts in the Deer Park Americana Music Series, you can follow the series’ page on Facebook.]

 

The Ryder ● September 2014

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