Kelsey Bosch

Inspired by this month’s Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film Dialogue and Retrospective, five voices, all working at the intersection of documentary, politics, and activism, offer perspectives on the documentary form. Together, they describe how storytelling has the power to redefine history, inviting us to consider a walk in different shoes—a proven strategy to influence powerful decisions, impact laws, and save and change lives.

What can we glean from a vampiric sense of time? Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, screening at the Walker Halloween night, ruminates on the haunting of genius past, while presenting the horror of an unexamined life. Vampires are rendered not as monsters, but keepers of prophetic wisdom. Revisiting the vampire film in context with Jarmusch’s most recent zombie horror flick, The Dead Don’t Die, a knotted thread of Jarmuschian undead pessimism emerges.

Film in the Cities shaped our region’s film community and industry by teaching, exhibiting, and producing film from 1970 to 1993. FITC founder Tom DeBiaso reflects on the organization’s founding and impact nearly 50 years after its inception: “It legitimized the creative impulse to work in film, photography and video as an art form, and as part of a cultural community in this area.”

What makes a cult classic? Scratching beneath the surface of Italian horror master Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), screening at the Walker Cinema this Halloween, we find hyper-intentional layering of cultural references spanning centuries. From folktales, occult practices, and literature, to cinema and art, Argento mines our collective past to create a narrative that speaks to our deepest fears.

Shot in Minneapolis on a shoestring budget, David Burton Morris’s Purple Haze (1983) reimagined the Vietnam War genre film to focus not on the war itself but on the lives of young men who were coming of age during that anxious time. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the film launched a 30-year career for Morris and Victoria Wozniak, Purple Haze’s writer and executive producer.  In anticipation of the film’s Walker screening, Morris and Wozniak discuss the Twin Cities film scene in in the ’80s, the ’60s counter-culture, and the film’s resonance in the Trump era.

In the second of a two-part look into the curatorial thinking behind the Walker’s programmatic focus on the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, the Walker’s Moving Image staff describes how films selected for the Summer Heat ’68 film series capture the atmosphere and mood of a time when filmmakers and revolutionaries were in constant conversation and asks: is it truly possible to join the revolution and profit as an artist?

Can moving image and dance perform together? HIJACK, the dance duo of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder, discuss their final performance in the Walker’s Bentson Mediatheque and the choices and challenges that come with dancing in front of audiences who’ve come to view avant-garde film.

From shattered landscape to hospital bed to the ghost towns of paradise, Zhao Liang’s Behemoth is a complex reflection on the cost of industrialization. Here Zhao discusses the film’s symbolism, score, and relationship to his visual art practice.