DIGS theater lacks indie, artsy films

Student says art school needs diverse films

Connor de Bruler
Opinion editor

I hope I’m not the only one who’s been grossly disappointed by the selection of films at Dina’s Place cinema.

When I was in high school, I dreamt of watching all the strange, experimental, trashy art films that I could alongside fellow students in a dark corner of the student union.

I love fringe cinema.

I was an amateur scholar of Italian horror films like “Suspiria” and “Don’t Torture a Duckling.” I thought John Waters was the greatest director since Orson Welles.

I used to read about all the crazy nonsense that took place at old screenings of Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures.”

Police convoys used to raid the screenings and take everyone in the audience away in handcuffs.

That’s what I call excitement.

More recently, a police department in Victoria, Australia burned down a theater after an illegal screening of “Ken Park.”

Takashi Miike handed out barf bags at the first screening of “Ichi the Killer.”

But we don’t have this kind of excitement at Winthrop.

We need crazy midnight screenings of bizarre movies that push the envelope, not the rejected Netflix rentals and Hollywood movies we’ve already seen.

Forget that.

This is a college campus. Better yet, this school is regarded as an arts school. We should be screening student-made films and gutbucket horror movies.

We should be playing films that can’t be screened anywhere else.  

We should be screening French nudity and Korean martial arts.

We should be screening the droll tundra of Aki Kaurismaki’s Finland or the emotional tour-de-force of Ermanno Olmi’s post-war Italy.

My parents met at a student union screening of David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.”

My dad shushed my mother after she screamed during the scene when James Woods pulls a gun from his stomach.

Maybe I’m asking for too much.

Perhaps I could make a concession.

If we continue to play blockbusters, then for every mainstream film we should play one underground flick.
I doubt, however, that this opinion will be taken seriously.