Satoshi Kon's anime fantasy—a mind-blower on a Videodrome/2001 scale of sensory and intellectual bombardment—exemplifies more than any digital-animation feature in years the freedom of working in a medium with no physical restraints. Following a sleep-troubled film-noir cop who prowls the subconscious of a near-future Tokyo, Kon explores the relationship of dream logic to the visual grammar of movies while playing eye-boggling tricks with perspective, distending bodies and boundaries and looping his nightmare scenarios. And yet at the movie's heart is a wistful, romantic affirmation of the need for inviolate space where our inner selves can soar. Presented by Gerald Figal, Vanderbilt associate professor of history and East Asian studies, the film screens as part of the university's International Lens series, free and open to the public. Also this week: the Nashville premieres of Bruno Dumont's war drama Flanders (Sept. 25) and Andrés Wood's Chilean dawn-of-Pinochet remembrance Machuca (Oct. 1).
Tue., Sept. 30, 7 p.m., 2008
