Movie Time with Dr. Pete

Friends, cinephiles, and the moving image arts curious, lend me your ears;

This month I, your friendly neighborhood doctor of movies,* am presenting two films for Catamount Arts' weekly 6 pm FREE film screenings with the theme "Screening the Invisible." This Wednesday, May 11, we are watching Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Blue" (1993).**

I first encountered "Three Colors: Blue" way back in the late '90s, when I was a fresh-faced college upperclassman English major taking a film course for the first time. It was the first film I saw that opened my eyes to the possibility that movies could be more than fun entertainment, and it holds a soft spot in my heart to this day. It is also a film that tries to put the viewer into relation with something not visible, which is a bit of a trick for a photography-based medium like film, and leads to our theme this month.

Starring the ever-lovely Juliette Binoche and the first of Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski's French-produced Three Colors trilogy, "Blue" adopts, from the start, several immaterial guiding components. First is the color blue, the first color of the French flag, which dominates the film's color palette. Second, in association with the color, the film explores the first concept of the French national motto "Liberty, equality, fraternity." Finally, through the narrative, the film explores its central immaterial/invisible concept—that of love. A composer whose family is killed in the opening scene, the film centers on Julie's attempts to abandon everything associated with her past life, including human connection and her music which, associated in the film with the color blue, becomes an aural, quasi-invisible personification of all she has tried to leave behind.

See you on Wednesday! 6 pm, at Catamount Arts.

~Pete

* Yes, I am really a doctor. No, not the useful kind of doctor.
** (1993, France, 98 minutes, French with English subtitles)

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