with actress Eva Marie Saint and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, interviewed
by Duane Byrge (1959). Hitchcock classic road movie, also starring Cary Grant
and James Mason.
with actress Eva Marie Saint and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, interviewed
by Duane Byrge (1959). Hitchcock classic road movie, also starring Cary Grant
and James Mason.
with filmmaker James Benning
(1995) Does landscape determine history or vice-versa? Director James Benning captures the heavenly, Mormonized landscape of Utah, while 140 years of NewYork Times articles frame the vivid scenes. Made by a renowned experimental filmmaker of landscapes, whose road movie North on Evers screens on Saturday, Deseret was acclaimed at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
(1950) John Ford cast Ben Johnson, the great Western character
actor, as a wagon master who leads Mormons through the desert
to religious freedom. Many consider this to be Ford's most personal
and exquisite reverie on the West and the desert. Shown with Cowgirl
(1996), Sunny Lee's portrait of a western-lovin', Spam-eatin'
Asian American woman determined to snare a bull-riding cowboy.
(1964) The industrial wasteland of Ravenna, Italy is the setting
for Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film, starring Richard
Harris and Monica Vitti as an emotionally estranged factory manager
and his wife. With the colors restored, it is easier to look through
them, as Vincent Canby writes, "to the terror-filled vacuum
beyond, which is the real landscape of Antonioni's singular studies."
with archivist Patrick Loughney (Library of Congress) and accompaniment by Art Wheeler
In The Virginian (1914) two best friends' exclusive male society is threatened when teacher Molly Wood comes into the picture.
Girl of the Golden West (1915) also pairs director Cecil B. DeMille and art director Wilfred Buckland. The film tells the tale of Mabel, feisty owner of the Polka saloon, being courted by local Sheriff Jack Rance, but still finding herself attracted to the mysterious stranger, Dick Johnson.
with guest speaker Michael Walsh (University of Hartford)
(1990) Filmmaker Derek Jarman, HIV-Positive, spent his last years in a cottage on a desolate stretch of land beneath a nuclear power plant, creating an impossible garden. This film is his exhilarating avant-garde, spiritual, and irreverent celebration of his creation.
Shown with Peter Greenaway's early landscape films, Water Wrackets and H is For House.
(1960) This emotionally wrenching and visually ravishing Cinemascope film is a neglected American classic by Elia Kazan. Jo Van Fleet refuses to leave her home when floods threaten the land, Montgomery Clift is the TVA administrator evicting her, and Lee Remick is torn between mother Fleet and lover Clift. Shown with The River (1938), Pare Lorentz's classic documentary, with music by Virgil Thompson, about the Mississippi River and Roosevelt's New Deal reforms to save the area.
(1967 ) The modern road movie came into its own when producer-star
Warren Beatty drafted director Arthur Penn and writers David Newman
and Robert Benton, infatuated with the innovations of French New
Wave filmmaking, to tell the tale of two romantic '30s gangsters,
icons of '60s rebellion.
with guest filmmaker Austin Allen
(1995) Allen explores the complex functions served by public parks in African-American neighborhoods, and the political struggles required to sustain these open spaces. Allen crisscrosses the country, from a park in New Orleans where slaves danced to an Oakland, CA park that was a meeting place of the Black Panthers to a Birmingham park where local sheriff Bull Connor hosed down Civil Rights demonstrators.
Virginia Film Office director Rita McClenny is joined by a group of movie professionals-director, location manager, art director, and other specialists-who will demonstrate their methods of tracking down locations for films, and reminisce about their own geographic experiences.
(1989) Pat O'Neill's masterful experimental collage film explores many of the same issues as Chinatown (the significance of water and power in the creation of LA), but it addresses these poetically, creating an awesome visual "city symphony."
(1974) A city-Los Angeles-is built from a desert through the manipulation
of water and power. John Huston is one of the millionaires who
profits, and Jack Nicholson is the investigator who tries to uncover
his crimes and protect his daughter, played by Faye Dunaway.
Roman Polanski directs Robert Towne's legendary screenplay.
(1995) An engrossing documentary about the use and misuse of technology
on the American farm, the film interweaves the filmmaker's personal
narrative of her father's infatuation with chemical farming in
the 1950's, and the experiences of organic farmer Fred Kirschenmann
today. Shown with The Burning Barrel (Tim Schwab/Christina
Craton), a meditation on the personal consequences of consumer
culture told from the vantage point of a declining rural landscape.
Tribes (Glenn McClanan) is set by a swamp in Princess
Anne County, Virginia 1919, when a black Civil War hero becomes
the target of a white farmer's revenge. Coolbreeze and Buzz
(Lani Sciandra) is set in the lush green crucible of the
Florida panhandle, where two women live in a trailer, and a man-brother
and father to the women-drifts by. They Live in Guinea
(Jonathan Mednick) documents the daily struggles of fishermen
trying to sustain their livelihood in Guinea, Virginia.
with filmmaker Iara Lee and producer George Gund
(1996) The film takes off from the idea that humankind's effort
to control nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly
emerging, an artificial reality. Cutting-edge technologies promise
seemingly unlimited powers to transform bodies and selves. The
filmmakers, aided by observers like Jaron Lanier and Howard Rheingold,
informatively survey the new virtual universe with humor and great
style.
(1996)
A work-in-progress presented by Mark Rappaport
An essay/meditation/cultural critique that uses clips from a wide variety of Hollywood movies to explore the representation of gays in Hollywood genres, including the western. Rappaport will demonstrate the methods that are producing this film and his acclaimed "Rock Hudson's Home Movies" and "From the Journals of Jean Seberg."
with screenwriter Ernest Lehman
with archivist Rick Prelinger
Rick Prelinger returns to the Virginia Film Festival with a program
of "ephemeral films," Prelinger's name for industrial
and educational films which are so hilariously and painfully revealing
about their (and our) time. Today's program shows Americans driven
by car company propaganda: Midwest Holiday (1953, 27 min.),
Freedom Highway (1955, 35min.) and Caught Mapping
(1940, 9 min.). Prelinger will demonstrate his CD-ROM compilation,
Our Secret Century, later today at Clemons.
The Festival's annual gathering of screenwriters will explore
the screenwriter's role in the creation of locations, and the
ways that places realize and transform the potentialities of language.
Admission is free.
(1984) Writer Sam Shepard and director Wim Wenders won the Grand
Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for their powerful collaborative
creation. Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis Anderson, a man who
returns from the desert to reunite with his son, and attempt to
reclaim his wife, played by Nastassja Kinski.
with guest screenwriter Peter Wollen
with video artist Ellen Spiro, photographer Carol Burch-Brown,
and poet David Rigsbee
(1996) Narrated by a dying dog, Roam Sweet Home (written
and performed by Allan Gurganus) ventures across the age divide
to tell stories of adventurous elderly people who have taken to
the road in RV's. Preceding this tape will be a slideshow of
photographs from Carol Burch Brown's new Univ. Press of VA Trailers,
a sensitive portrayal of life in the sub-culture of regional
mobile homes, accompanied by poet David Rigsbee's narration.
(1940) Adapted from the John Steinbeck novel, John Ford's film
follows the Joad family in their struggle on the open road, as
they migrate across the Dust Bowl of the Southwest during the
Depression. Henry Ford gives an unforgettable performance as Tom
Joad, backed strongly by Jane Darwell and John Carradine.
Daytrippers follows Eliza (Hope Davis) and
her family in a car ride through New York City, as they attempt to catch
Louis (Stanley Tucci), Eliza's husband, cheating on her. Parker Posey is
sarcastic sister Jo and Anne Meara is the over-the-top mom. This
hilariously dysfunctional car ride won the grand prize at the Deauville
Film Festival.
with guest filmmaker James Benning
(1991) In North on Evers, James Benning may have made the
ultimate American road movie, as he charts his trip across the
West, through the South, up the East Coast, and back to California.
The film, filled with encounters with old friends, one-night stands,
and historical sites, is a marvelously photographed, intensely
felt, and disturbing portrait of the American social landscape.
with producer Mark Gordon
featuring guest animator Suzan Pitt
Suzan Pitt is an internationally known independent animator whose
films, including the classic Asparagus and recent film
Joy Street, are rooted in the "cartoon critters"
of animation history. Pitt writes: "The animated characters
of the Twentieth Century are simulations aimed to fill a void
in the world where the wild state of nature has already been destroyed."
Tonight, Pitt will screen and introduce her own work, and cartoons
by her illustrious predecessors, including Chuck Jones's Road
Runner.
(1996) Michael Stipe costars in Christopher Munch's magnificently
photographed story of a dying Western railroad.
(1996) REM's document of their 1995 tour in Dolby SurroundSound.
Sweet Smell of Success
(Regal Cinema, Friday at 10pm)
It Happened One Night
(Culbreth, Saturday at 10am)
On the eve of Frank Capra's centennial year, we present his Academy
Award-winning screwball road comedy. Clark Gable and Claudette
Colbert play a wisecracking reporter and a crazy heiress who cannot
be kept apart, even by the walls of Jericho.
Freedom Highway...And Other Ephemeral Road Movies
(Vinegar Hill, Saturday at 10am)
Easy Rider
(Vinegar Hill, Saturday at 1pm)
Easy Rider, starring Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson,
replaces Two Lane Blacktop in the program, because of an unfortunate
booking conflict. Two Lane Blacktop and the Mark McElhatten Skid
program will be rescheduled as a Film Society event in the spring. Easy
Rider has been selected because many patrons have asked that it be
added to our road movies retrospective.
Screenwriters Panel
(Regal Cinema, Saturday at 1pm)
Paris, Texas
(Culbreth, Saturday at 1pm)
Profession: Reporter
(Culbreth, Saturday at 4pm)
(1975) Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider star in Antonioni's
English-language road movie about a reporter who attempts to destroy
his own identity and assume another's. We are proud to present
the American premiere of the uncut, European version of The
Passenger, including scenes of magnificent visual poetry removed
by its American distributor. Courtesy of Proteus Films Inc.
Roam Sweet Home and Trailers
(Vinegar Hill, Saturday at 4pm)
The Grapes of Wrath
(Regal Cinema, Saturday at 4pm)
Daytrippers
(Culbreth, Saturday at 7pm)
North on Evers
(Vinegar Hill, Saturday at 7pm)
Cold Fever
(Regal Cinema, Saturday at 7pm)
(1995) This drily hilarious, visually enthralling Icelandic road
movie follows a Japanese businessman across the landscape of Iceland
as he travels to bury his parents, who have died from salmonella
poisoning after eating too much fish.
Speed
(Culbreth, Saturday at 10pm)
The Road Runner and Other Cartoon Critters
(Vinegar Hill, Saturday at 10pm)
Staccato Purr of the Exhaust
(Regal Cinema, Saturday at 10pm)
(1996) Luis Meza's first feature is a cutting edge anti-road
movie about a teenager who, with his car stolen, is trapped in
limbo between a miserable family and community of friends in LA
and future happiness in Texas. Shown with Tattoo Teardrop,
Michael Wilson's dramatic portrait, set against LA's harsh
urban landscape, of black and Latino gangs wrestling with issues
of death and morality.
Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day
(Culbreth, Sunday at 10am)
Road Movie
(Culbreth, Sunday at 1pm)