The University announced the hiring of Edrick Floréal as the new head coach of the Longhorn track and field program Wednesday afternoon, ending the five-month vacancy of the position.

Floréal spent the previous six seasons at the helm of Kentucky’s track and field program, where he transformed the Wildcats into a national power. Under Floréal, the Kentucky women earned three team trophies in the past four years, while the men never ranked lower than 22nd in the NCAA rankings during his tenure.

“Edrick is a terrific coach who has a tremendous reputation in the track and field community,” said Chris Del Conte, vice president and athletics director. “He’s a coach I’ve followed for a long time and is so well respected. Everyone I talked to had great things to say, and I really enjoyed visiting with him. I am excited about what he’ll bring to our program and how he’ll build on the proud tradition of Texas track and field.”

Wildcat athletes won 12 event NCAA Championships, earned 142 All-America honors, 37 individual SEC Championships and five Academic All-America honors during his time at Kentucky.

“People who know me know I’m a tireless worker; I’m a workaholic and love being at the track,” Floréal said. “I am driven to succeed and come to work every day with the burning desire to make everybody on the team better. I am going to bring that same focus, passion and drive to Texas. I am so excited to get there, meet the team and become a part of the Longhorn community.”

During part of Floréal’s 25-year coaching career, he served as Team USA’s jumps and multi-events coach in the 2012 London Olympics, where his team earned six medals. He is also the man responsible for coaching Keni Harrison at the 2017 International Association of Athletic Federations World Championships, where Harrison set the world record in the 100-meter hurdles.

“It’s because of them that I have an opportunity like this, and I am so excited to be the head coach at Texas,” Floréal said. “It’s the elite of the elite in track and field programs, and the potential to achieve greatness is fantastic. You have the premier track and field state in the country to recruit in, a rich and proud history and are the flagship institution of the state. It’s truly an amazing opportunity.”

To complement his coaching resume, Floréal participated in two Summer Olympics in 1988 and 1992, won bronze in the 1990 Commonwealth Games and won 5 NCAA titles in the triple-jump.

“He is a proven program builder and developer of young people,” Del Conte said.  “And, as a former track legend from the days of the Southwest Conference, he knows this part of the country and the passion that our great state has for the sport.”

Courtesy of A24

Since its premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, critics can’t stop raving about Ari Aster’s debut film, “Hereditary.” They describe it as “The Exorcist” for a new generation. Part of a new breed of contemplative horror (in line with recent hits such as 2015’s “The Witch”), “Hereditary” isn’t exactly the game changer that its passionate defenders claim, but it will undoubtedly leave a shocking impression on any adventurous viewer.

In “Hereditary,” the matriarch of the Graham family has recently passed away, leaving her daughter Annie (Toni Collette) with a strange sense of ease. As Annie states in her eulogy, her mother lived an intensely private, mysterious life and was an unnerving force upon the family. In group therapy sessions, Annie discusses her family’s history of mental illness, which led to the deaths of her father and brother. Annie lives a simple — yet tumultuous — life, working on a series of personal dioramas for a New York art show. Her doctor husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) keeps to himself, and their teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) constantly fights with her over her unstable parenting. The youngest member of the Graham clan is Annie and Steve’s daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), a doll-making, tongue-clicking outcast disturbed by her grandmother’s favoritism toward her. When another tragedy strikes the Grahams, the family uncovers even more dark secrets left behind by their dead.

Despite its meticulous, Kubrickian style, “Hereditary” is driven by its actors. Collette’s performance is an Oscar-worthy tour-de-force through internalized grief and anxiety, one which explodes into a fearsome, otherworldly madness. Shapiro exudes creepiness as Charlie, and Wolff delivers the performance of his career as Peter, the film’s tragic center of gravity. Aster knows exactly when to give each character the spotlight, adapting his own zone of quiet control to their performances.

Overall, Aster’s approach is a slow-burning one. Amid a quiet soundscape like an unnerving echo chamber, the occasional supernatural screeches and quarrelsome clamors hit you like a bullet to the chest. It’s a restrained film, one that only reveals the unimaginable when it’s too late. A gruesome image toward the end of the first act, the film’s first instance of graphic violence, is sure to send some viewers sprinting to the exits. The film gradually builds to moments such as this at a glacial place, simmering in an unease that infiltrates the senses as well as the imagination.

But at 127 minutes, Aster’s film suffers at times from issues with length and focus. In the second act, the film’s narrative and themes grind to a halt as Aster turns his eye to too many threads at once. Thankfully, he miraculously crawls out of this grave to deliver a true stunner of a third act — a gut-wrenching, near-Vaudevillian carnival of satanic festivity. Still, much of this fault lies in Aster’s surplus of ambition, one that often gets the best of him in such a controlled bigger picture. In a June 7 interview with The Verge, he said he was trying to make “Hereditary” something greater than a horror film, and that’s more than just a misplaced notion. His metaphors are too obvious, even pedestrian, to be brilliant, but he knows how to craft a masterful, endlessly imaginative horror picture at his core. If “Hereditary” had been streamlined to 90-odd minutes, I’d have left the theater in a straight jacket. Instead, I merely wanted to give my therapist a call.

Still, there’s something almost magical about the moments of horror Aster shot. Most of the film’s most effective sequences take place in the Graham household, where Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski shoot interiors from a still distance, recalling the observational artifice of Annie’s domestic dioramas. The cinematography feeds into moments of familial strife with relentless aesthetic invention, making them all the more powerful. A dinner table fight between Annie and Peter is arguably the film’s greatest moment — a simple scene that makes Aster’s set pieces more devastating. Without the family drama at its core, “Hereditary”’s unique scare factor simply wouldn’t exist, and it makes the film’s discourse on kinship — both biological and social — all the more chilling.

Good horror films are often an invigorating physical workout. But “Hereditary” is no haunted house rollercoaster ride — it’s a cold, methodical psychological assault. Aster allows terror to seep into you, sneaking behind enemy lines, slowly marinating and breaking you down. It stays under your skin and deep inside your bones, haunted by unspoken horrors to which you shouldn’t have borne witness. Leaving the theater, you feel as if you, too, have been cursed for life.

Grade: B+

The post Household Horror Show ‘Hereditary’ is a Measured Marvel appeared first on The Emory Wheel.

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Russian artist Anton Vidokle spoke at the Blaffer Art Museum about his film trilogy, “Immortality for All.” | Cristobella Durrette/The Cougar

The lights dim and a woman seated on a bridge fills the screen, ushering in the debut of the fourth installment of the once film trilogy “Immortality for All” by Russian filmmaker Anton Vidokle at a recent talk at the Blaffer Art Museum.

The rough cut of Vidokle’s latest film continues his exploration of Russian Cosmism, a utopian philosophy that advocates for the possibility of human immortality and the resurrection of the dead.

The teachings of cosmism founder Nikolai Federov, a Russian librarian and teacher, serve as the dialogue over the course of the four films. The first three films feature dialogue spoken in Russian, while the latest installment is spoken in Japanese.

The latest installment of the film takes place in Japan, while the other three take place in locations around Siberia and Kazakhstan. All of these locations are significant to the development and spread of the ideas of cosmism, Vidokle said.

This change of scenery was undertaken in an effort to help shed cosmism’s Russian label and convey its nature as a universal philosophy, Vidokle said.

“For me, it’s very interesting to explore more international manifestations of [cosmism],” Vidokle said. “Japan is definitely one of them.”

After initially learning about the concepts of cosmism a decade ago, Vidokle explained that he wanted to disseminate the idea in a new way and bring it back to public attention. To achieve this, he chose film as his medium.

“The cinema of film creates a new church that combines many different experiences into one entity,” Vidokle said. “It combines all branches of art, from images and words to text and sound, to produce a strong experience.” 

The experience and artistic practice of Vidokle’s films are something that 2014 alumna Cindy Pena, has been following since her undergraduate career.  

“I think it’s really important to revisit a philosophy that advocates for more care and more interrelations between species and nature,” Pena said. “An interrelated, interconnected thing where everything feeds off each other.”

Mirroring this interrelation, Vidokle’s four films are connected by the ideals of cosmism, expanding from the basic concepts of cosmist thought to specific instances of its relevancy, according to his artist statement.

He plans to continue filming and exploring these ideas in the future.

“More films, as many as I can make,” Vidokle said. “I want to shoot one in the United States. That’s the next challenge.”

Until those films are released, the first three installments of Immortality for All are exhibiting at the Blaffer Art Museum through August 11, 2018.

arts@thedailycougar.com

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“Russian filmmaker explores school of thought from home country” was originally posted on The Daily Cougar

In this episode of Spotlight on Science, Arts and Culture Writer Frankie Lewis speaks with Jordan Bailey, the president of the UO Biomechanics club. Within their conversation are the specifics on the prosthetic arm the club is 3D printing, as well was some more information on the field of biomechanics.

Spotlight on Science is a series from the Emerald Podcast Network designed ot spark conversations across disciplines with researchers at the University of Oregging in researchers to discuss their work in a way that is understandable to everyone.

Music in this episode is “Zombie Disco” by Six Umbrellas.

This episode was produced by Alec Cowan.

The post Podcast: Spotlight on Science: 3D prosthetics with the UO Biomechanics club appeared first on Emerald Media.