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11:00 am L’Age d’or (dir. Luis Buňuel, 1930, 60 mins.)
L’Age d’Or was a follow up to Buňuel’s collaboration with Salvador Dali: Un Chien Andalou, a groundbreaking surrealist film that opens with a razor slicing the eyeball of a woman. L’Age d’Or details the sexual and social frustrations of a couple prevented from consummating their love by their families, the Church and society. According to Buňuel, Dali wrote that the film was about “the impossible force that thrusts two people together [and] the impossibility of their ever becoming one.” At the opening of the film in Paris in 1930, fascists led a violent protest of the film’s fetishism and blasphemy. Critic Michael Atkinson called L’Age d’Or “subversive culture’s seminal anthem film.” 12:45 pm Kaidan (dir. Masaki Kobayashi, 1964, 125 mins.)
Nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in 1965, Kaidan is a collection of four different ghost stories, drawn from Japanese folktales. These quasi-horror stories feature a snow witch, a blind musician and a lovelorn samurai. The Kobayashi, a student of Asian art, explores common ground between traditional Japanese visual arts and cinematic expression. The work is a “visually ravishing film that uses dazzling color palettes and carefully composed widescreen photography to bring the viewer into an entirely supernatural world,” writes critic James Kendrick. Kobayashi painted the expressionistic sets himself, worked out the splashy mood lighting, and, most important, coördinated the visual elements with the innovative music of Toru Takemitsu. The composer rooted his score in such indigenous Japanese sounds as the striking of certain hard stones that–according to one authority–are found only on the

 3:00 pm Blow-Up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966, 111 mins.)
A detached, aimless

London fashion photographer wanders into a park where he photographs what may be a murder. Antonini’s classic thriller was the highest grossing art film of that date, gaining Oscar nominations for screenplay and direction. Blow-Up is a film about illusion, seduction and ennui—a zeitgeist of the swinging sixties—that also toys with the subjectivity of artist, object, and perception.

 If you like this set of films…Attend as much of the Indianapolis International Film Festival as possible. Take time to linger in the Campos-Pons exhibit.  You should know before you go…Read reviews of L’Age d’Or, Kaidan, and Blow-up.  

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