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.
May December (2023, 117 minutes} Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie Atherton-Yu and her husband Joe (23 years her junior) brace themselves for their twins to graduate from high school. When Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry comes to spend time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Joe, never having processed what happened in his youth, starts to confront the reality of life as an empty-nester at 36. And as Elizabeth and Gracie study each other, the similarities and differences between the two women begin to ebb and flow.