The Dartmouth Film Society

All of the films on this page come from the Dartmouth Film Society’s fall 2020 lineup of films. The Dartmouth Film Society was founded in 1949 as the first college group in the US to bring unique types of films to be shown on college campuses. This term, the Dartmouth Film Society is hosting meetings for its members to discuss films from this series. Most of this term’s films come from the last decade, and many of them deal with themes of identity, whether racial, gender, sexual, or otherwise. The authors have chosen the following four films from this series to write about on this website: Lady Bird, Moonlight, Rafiki, and Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse.

Identity

While the four films displayed on this website vary by place, characters and genre, they are linked by a single theme: identity. Each film brings this concept to the forefront, whether through demonstrating how people struggle with it, or by showing how it influences the audience. In the four essays available here, each author analyzes how identity is interpreted in the film they viewed, and discusses elements that strengthen the film’s message, such as editing or set design. The authors also discuss different facets of identity presented in each film: for example, in one paragraph, the essay “A Hero to All” (written for Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse) discusses how clothing alters the audience’s perception of the protagonist. Each of these films offers a different take on the concept of identity, and the essays present here will delve deeper into the unique way each film presents said concept.