Contact: Victoria Joyce (804)-361-1259
Virginia Film Festival Features Array of Classics
Highlighted by A Chaplin Evening
with the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra
The 1998 Virginia Film Festival will present over thirty classic films demonstrating the many ways films construct images of "cool," with a special focus on the use of jazz underscoring to create a cool ambience. One featured event will demonstrate the earliest instance of jazz scoring - the use of ragtime music to accompany silent films. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, a twelve-piece orchestra from New York headed by Rick Benjamin, will accompany A Charlie Chaplin Evening on Friday, October 30 at 7pm in Culbreth Theatre. Additional classic film highlights in the Festival program include Mickey One and Alice's Restaurant accompanied by director Arthur Penn; The Manchurian Candidate with composer David Amram; a blaxploitation double feature of Superfly and Foxy Brown; a screening of Antonioni's Blowup followed by a three-day shot-by-shot workshop on the film with Roger Ebert; the best film ever made about country music, Payday, with guest actor Rip Torn; and the pre-release version of The Big Sleep.
The Chaplin classics that will be screened are The Immigrant, The Adventurer, and The Rink. This is an event that will delight audiences of all ages. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (PRO) under the direction of its founder, Rick Benjamin, is the leading exponent of vintage American popular music, and the world's most active ensemble of its kind. Performing turn-of-the-century treasures, the PRO has performed at the Smithsonian Institution, Michigan State's Wharton Center, the Waterloo Music Festival, and at the 92nd Street "Y". The PRO's repertoire is a varied and exciting one, skipping from waltzes to marches, operatic parodies and novelty numbers to Blues and popular songs from the era. All this before they begin their signature syncopated centerpiece the rag! Tickets are $10 for the public and $5 for students with I.D., seniors, and children under twelve. "A surprising delight," says the Washington Post. "Brassy and rollicking, yet polished, the PRO is acknowledged as the leading exponent of vintage American popular musicŠBenjamin is a genial tour guide through the period, offering informative introductions to the films and the music."
Many more great classics will be featured throughout the Festival, arranged within daily sub-themes. From Thursday night through Friday afternoon, October 29-30, Crime Jazz will be explored. According to Festival director Richard Herskowitz, " We decided not to feature films about jazz musicians, but rather films that use jazz underscoring to create an ambience of urban crime and danger." Features include Arthur Penn's Mickey One, starring Warren Beatty and featuring saxophone improvisations from Stan Getz, The Manchurian Candidate, with special guest, the legendary Beat jazz and classical composer David Amram. Also screening will be The Cincinnati Kid, scored by Lalo Schifrin, Anatomy of a Murder, with Oscar-winning music by Duke Ellington, and Shirley Clarke's The Connection, a 1961 pseudo-documentary about New York junkies featuring on-screen performances by Freddie Redd. The screening of The Connection will honor both Shirley Clarke, who died this year, and the film's producer, Lewis Allen, who will accompany the film. A Friday afternoon panel featuring David Amram and Stu Gardner will explore Composing Jazz Scores for the Media.
Friday, October 30 also launches the topic of Tough Guys and Fatal Femmes, headlined by a special screening of the pre-release version of Howard Hawks' noir classic, The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. "The Virginia Film Festival always promotes film preservation, and this is one of the most important preservation projects of the past few years," says assistant director James Scales. This screening will be followed by a short documentary about the transformation of The Big Sleep from the pre-release to the released version. Other features in this section include Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, featuring Alain Delon giving the Bogart image a French existential spin and a double whammy of blaxploitation classics Superfly (with the amazing crime jazz/soul music of Curtis Mayfield) and Foxy Brown (starring Pam Grier, before her Tarantino resurrection as Jackie Brown). A variant on the movie tough guy, the "swinger" image popularized by Frank Sinatra (and seen emerging in his performance in From Here to Eternity, screening Saturday) is dissected by director John Cassavetes and actor Ben Gazzara in the amazing, rarely screened Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Finally, the coolest femme fatale of all time, Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora' s Box, will be given a jazzy live accompaniment by Art Wheeler.
Saturday, viewers will be treated to Rebel Boys and Riot Grrrls. The teen rebel male image that emerged from Hollywood in the Fifties continues to inform our impressions of "cool" today, and it brought the vulnerability hiding beneath the movie tough guy's veneer far closer to the surface. The evolution from "tough guy" to "rebel boy" is evident in the performances of both Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, and is fully realized in the ultimate teen rebel movie, Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean. John Cassavetes' Shadows, with jazz scoring by Charles Mingus, brings out what Norman Mailer memorably described as the "White Negro" dimension of the hipster in Ben Carruthers' performance as a biracial rebel, as does Marlon Brando's performance in the underrated The Fugitive Kind, written by Tennessee Williams. A more recent group of nihilistic teen rebels, including Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves, shock Dennis Hopper, the rebel veteran of Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider, in The River's Edge. Cultural studies scholars Jose Munoz and Jonathan Flatley will give a presentation on Keanu Cool to explore this latest manifestation of the rebel boy. (The rebel girl image, relatively neglected by Hollywood, will be explored through several new independent films screening on Saturday).
The final day of the Festival, November 1, addresses Hippies, Punks and Other Subcultures, including the most profound and moving feature film treatments of the hippie era, Alice's Restaurant. Director Arthur Penn will be present to look back on the making of this classic. The contemporary punk scene will be explored in an independent premiere, Decline of Western Civilization III.
For Immediate Release