The further away the critics and film historians of Arts Blog get from Housing Day, the more significance the videos seem to garner in our eyes. The residents of Lowell, Eliot, and Cabot all receive rave reviews for their evocations of master auteurs in the second installment of this Housing Video retrospective. Look out for Parts 3 and 4 over the weekend.

Lowell- Drunk in Lowell

Director of Inspiration: Akira Kurosawa

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It’s a strange thing, the housing video. A medium of expression defined by the clashing motives of creativity and propaganda. The credibility of many a housing video has been lost in the smoke from the clash of these dueling callings. It takes some rare skill and deft camerawork to artfully imbue some 3 minutes of amateur work with both the craft and rhetoric demanded of that elusive good Housing Video. “Drunk in Lowell” most forcefully calls to mind the immortal work of a young Akira Kurosawa in its brazen house-patriotism. The courageous use of an overhead shot of the blue man climbing the winding steps of Lowell’s bell tower can be nothing but a deliberate evocation of Kurosawa’s preference for striking scene geometry over whatever bland spreads are being created in today’s traditional cinema.

This single shot of the intermingling between tree-tops and a singing rickshaw puller from Kurosawa’s obscure 1945 “Zoku Sugata Sanshirō" reflects the stark angles in the bell tower shot of Lowell’s video:

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