This film series, in memory of Mike Beltzman, will explore how films create (ideal) viewers in and through cinematic techniques like narrative style, plot, editing, scene sequencing, dialogue, and emotional response. Films are powerful means of evoking thought, emotion, and judgement around representations of different social and political issues: legal and political culture, crime, punishment, intimacy, race, identity, gender, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, dignity, and value. In short, film has become an essential form of cultural activity that either challenges us to interrogate dominant norms and practices or deepens our uncritical allegiance to them.
Dallas Buyers Club (2013, 117 minutes) In mid-1980s Texas, electrician Ron Woodroof is stunned to learn that he has AIDS. Though told that he has just 30 days left to live, Woodroof refuses to give in to despair. He seeks out alternative therapies and smuggles unapproved drugs into the US from wherever he can find them. Woodroof joins forces with a fellow AIDS trans patient (Jared Leto) and begins selling the treatments to the growing number of people who can't wait for the medical establishment to save them.