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Film critic kicks off desert appreciation series


Standing upon a jagged ridge of A Mountain in Tempe, looking past the towering buildings, the cactuses and red sand of the Sonoran Desert can be seen for miles in all directions.

Spanning over 100,000 square miles in the Southwest, the vast Sonoran Desert, and its relationship to deserts around the world, will be the subject of the Future Arts Research @ ASU three-day series, “The Desert Between Us,” which begins Thursday.

“We live in a desert, and we have a lot of conversations about development, but cultural sustainability is at the heart of our conversation,” said Marilu Knode, associate director and head of research of the program.

The series of more than eight lectures, performances and film screenings, all free to the public, will be given by visiting and local professors, artists and professionals.

Featured topics include Phoenix urban development, the use of past and present global desert architecture and the portrayal of Native Americans on film, Knode said.

FAR is based in downtown Phoenix and was established through a campus initiative to enhance arts research and engage international and local artists with the University and the surrounding community.

“Phoenix is at a tipping point — in terms of the economy, of course, and physical and cultural sustainability — and we are organizing these programs to contribute to this dialogue,” Knode said.

On Thursday, Phoenix-based film critic Colin Boyd will be kicking off the series with a discussion on the use of landscape in the work by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

“I love the desert, but I think it’s kind of been maligned in art, whether it’s serious or commercial products,” he said. “There’s just the overriding inference that it’s all bleak and desolate, that nothing can survive in a desert.”

Boyd said he chose to discuss Kiarostami’s work because he feels Kiarostami successively incorporates desert landscape into his films almost as if it were a character itself.

“What they’re trying to illustrate is how you can make a seemingly dead landscape, like a desert, look more lively,” he said.

Following Boyd’s discussion will be a screening of Kiarostami’s film “Taste of Cherry,” which was awarded the Palme d’Or at the international Cannes Film Festival in 1997.

Also, Boyd said he hopes his lecture and the entire series will help to end the perception of deserts being viewed as an “ends of the earth” in popular culture.

“We have to look outside of what our perception is,” he said. “We have to look outside borders and see what is out there.”

Boyd will be speaking at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Valley Art Theater in Tempe.

Boyd writes film reviews for Las Vegas City Life magazine and his Web site, www.getthebigpicture.net, where he also posts entertainment news. Although he has been professionally writing film reviews for 10 years, he was aware of his passion at an early age.

When he was 10 years old, Boyd wrote to a children’s magazine asking to be their resident film critic.

“I’ve had [reviewing films] in my head a lot longer than I have getting paid for it,” he said.

Reach the reporter at wclark4@asu.edu.


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