SCAD Cinema Studies

Casablanca (1942)
Saturday, June 23, 7pm – 10pm

One of the most beloved American films, this captivating wartime adventure of romance and intrigue from director Michael Curtiz defies standard categorization. Simply put, it is the story of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a world-weary ex-freedom fighter who runs a nightclub in Casablanca during the early part of WWII. Despite pressure from the local authorities, notably the crafty Capt. Renault (Claude Rains), Rick’s café has become a haven for refugees looking to purchase illicit letters of transit which will allow them to escape to America. One day, to Rick’s great surprise, he is approached by the famed rebel Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), Rick’s true love who deserted him when the Nazis invaded Paris. She still wants Victor to escape to America, but now that she’s renewed her love for Rick, she wants to stay behind in Casablanca.

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Not Rated; 102 min.

Tickets are free with SCAD ID, $6 for military/seniors/students, $8 for general public.
Purchase tickets at http://tickets.savannahboxoffice.com, or call 912-525-5050.

The Lucas Theatre for the Arts
32 Abercorn St., Savannah, GA

Charade
Friday, May 4, 7pm-10pm

Romance, humor and suspense in Paris, as a woman is pursued by several men who want a fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Whom can she trust? Garnered an Oscar nomination for Savannah’s own Johnny Mercer.

Funny Face (1957)
Saturday, May 5, 3pm-5pm

This filmed version of the 1927 George Gershwin Broadway musical, Funny Face utilizes the play’s original star, Fred Astaire, and several of the original tunes, then goes merrily off on its own. Astaire is cast as as fashion photographer Dick Avery (a character based on Richard Avedon, the film’s “visual consultant”), who is sent out by his female boss Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson) to find a “new face”. It doesn’t take Dick long to discover Jo (Audrey Hepburn, who does her own singing), an owlish Greenwich Village bookstore clerk. Acting as Pygmalion to Jo’s Galatea, Dick whisks the wide-eyed girl off to Paris and transforms her into the fashion world’s hottest model.

Roman Holiday (1953)
Saturday, May 5, 7pm-10pm

Roman Holiday (1953) is a delightful, captivating fairy-tale romance shot entirely on location in Rome, and produced and directed by William Wyler.

The film’s bittersweet story is a charming romantic-comedy, a kind of Cinderella tale in reverse. A runaway princess (Hepburn) rebels against her royal obligations and escapes the insulated confines of her royal prison to find a ‘Prince Charming’ commoner – an American reporter (Peck) covering the royal tour in Rome.

Tickets are $8 each, or a pass to all three films is $15.
Pass must be purchased by May 4th.
Call 912-525-5050 or go to www.lucastheatre.com for tickets.

Rashomon (1950)
Saturday, April 28, 7pm – 10pm

Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, Rashomon is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife. Toshiro Mifune gives another commanding performance in the eloquent masterwork that revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema to the world.

Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô and Masayuki Mori
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Language: Japanese
Unrated; 88 min.

Introduced and moderated by SCAD Film and Television professor Michael Chaney and SCAD Cinema Studies graduate students Ryan Fernandez and Kyle Lawrence.

Tickets are free with SCAD ID, $6 for military/seniors/students, $8 for general public.
Purchase tickets at http://tickets.savannahboxoffice.com, or call 912-525-5050.

University of Alabama at Birmingham
November 1-4, 2012

Submissions are invited for the fifth Foreign Language Film Conference, on the theme of Rights and Representations. In this historic setting of the American South, and in conjunction with Birmingham’s 50th-anniversary remembrance of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, FLFC celebrates civil and human rights. Scholars will consider the question of civil rights in international cinematic traditions. How does film as an art and a genre represent civil rights, and human rights? What are the places of rebellion, terrorism, or non-violent resistance in forging individual freedoms, and how is this reflected in national cinematic traditions? How do international films address issues of discrimination, violence, repression, the struggle for social equality? On the pedagogical side of the question, how do films about civil rights teach their viewers about international cultural and political traditions and movements? How are these films incorporated into classroom discussions of global civil rights?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following general areas:

- Violence of the State against individuals
- Violence of individuals against the State
- Historical representations of civil-rights struggles
- Terrorism
- Individual rights (safety, privacy, speech/expression, thought, religion)
- Anni di piombo, Rote Armee Fraktion, Operación Cóndor, Action directe, Zengakuren, June Fourth Incident, etc.
- Springtime of the Peoples
- Legal battles, changes, (re)definitions
- Groups targeted in discrimination (gender, race, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation)
- Civil rights pedagogy–teaching rights through film
- Adaptations of international rights standards
- Cinema as a model–aesthetic interpretations of civil rights debates and developments
- Effectivness: feature vs. documentary

Please submit an abstract of 250 words at www.uab.edu/languages/flfc by 1 June 2012. All submissions should be in English, including citations. Submission should include presenter’s name, contact address and telephone number, professional affiliation and status. Proposals for complete panels (related presentations) are welcome, but they must include abstracts and contact information, including e-mail address, for each presenter. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes, including any media support.

For questions or further information, please contact Serge Bokobza (sbokobza@uab.edu) or Rosemary Peters (rpeters@lsu.edu). Check Website for additional details on the Conference.

Saturday, April 14
7pm – 10pm

Trustees Theater
216 E. Broughton St., Savannah, GA

Fritz Lang’s classic early talkie crime melodrama is set in 1931 Berlin. The police are anxious to capture an elusive child murderer (Peter Lorre), and they begin rounding up every criminal in town. The underworld leaders decide to take the heat off their activities by catching the child killer themselves. Once the killer is fingered, he is marked with the letter “M” chalked on his back. He is tracked down and captured by the combined forces of the Berlin criminal community, who put him on trial for his life in a kangaroo court. The killer pleads for mercy, whining that he can’t control his homicidal instincts. The police close in and rescue the killer from the underworld so that he can stand trial again in “respectable” circumstances.

Starring: Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, and Inge Landgut
Directed by Fritz Lang
Language: German
Not Rated; 117 min.

Introduced and moderated by SCAD Cinema Studies professor Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton and SCAD cinema studies graduate students Winona Caesar and Meg V. Snead.

Tickets are free with SCAD ID, $6 for military/seniors/students, $8 for general public.
Purchase tickets at http://tickets.savannahboxoffice.com, or call 912-525-5050.

Thursday, April 12, 2012, at 5pm
Arnold Hall Auditorium
1810 Bull St., Savannah, GA

Perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-Prize winning history of American intellectual and philosophical life in the 19th and 20th centuries, The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus and Girroux, 2001), visiting scholar Louis Menand will present his lecture “The Education of Andy Warhol” on Thursday, April 5th at 5pm at Arnold Hall.

The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University (formerly a Distinguished Professor of English at CUNY), Menand’s other books include Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context (Oxford, 1987), American Studies (Farrar, Straus and Girroux 2002), The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton, 2010), and the forthcoming Art and Ideas in the Cold War (Farrar, Strauss and Girroux). He respectively edited and co-edited Pragmatism: A Reader (Vintage, 1996) and The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge, 2000). Essays by Menand have appeared in publications including, but not limited to, Best American Essays, The Nation, Dissent, and The New York Times. A regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1991, Menand was promoted to Staff Writer in 2001. In addition to The New Yorker, his reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Slate, The New Republic, Vogue, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, and Dissent, among many others.

Other honors for Menand include the 2002 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American History and the 2001 Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune for The Metaphysical Club, as well as honorary degrees from Pamona College and Harvard University.

For more information on “The Education of Andy Warhol” contact SCAD Cinema Studies Graduate Coordinator Dr. Roger Rawlings at rrawlings@scad.edu

Thursday, April 5, 2012, at 5:30pm
The Chapel, The Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation
439 East Broad Street, Savannah, GA

In relation to the forthcoming publication of Vol. 2 of the Cine-Files, SCAD’s online cinema studies journal, visiting scholar Dr. Richard Neupert will present his lecture, “From Criticism to Practice: The French New Wave” on Thursday, April 5, 2012, at 5:30pm at the Chapel, Center for Historic Preservation, 439 East Broad.

His lecture will give a broad overview of the French New Wave, with a special focus on the film criticism of Francois Truffaut and the influence of Jean Renoir.

Neupert, a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Wheatley Professor of the Arts at the University of Georgia, is the author of French Animation History (Wiley Blackwell, 2011), A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin UP, 2003, 2007), and The End: Narration and Closure in Cinema (Wayne State UP, 1995). In addition to numerous book chapters, he has published scholarly articles and film reviews in Studies in French Cinema, French Review, Film Quarterly, Film Review, Film History, and Film Criticism, among others. He has also translated two books from their original French: Aesthetics of Film (Texas UP, 1997) and The French New Wave: An Artistic School (Blackwell, 2002).

For more information about Dr. Neupert’s lecture, please contact SCAD Cinema Studies professor Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton at tcox@scad.edu.

Saturday, March 3
7 pm – 10pm

Trustees Theater
216 E. Brought St., Savannah, GA

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a loner, alienated from society, who finds work moonlighting as a cabbie. Inside him grows a morbid fascination and disgust with the seedy side of the city’s street life – a fascination that drives him to save a young prostitute and enact a vengeance against what he considers are the perpetrators of urban decay.

Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, and Harvey Keitel
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Rated R; 113 min.

The film will be introduced and moderated by SCAD Cinema Studies Chair Dr. Roger Rawlings and SCAD Cinema Studies graduate student Jonathan Waldrop.

Tickets are free with SCAD ID, $6 for military/seniors/students, $8 for general public.
Purchase tickets at http://tickets.savannahboxoffice.com, or call 912-525-5050.

By Eugenia Hannon

Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) is a taut, stylish “Cold War” thriller—it twists and turns with ease and rhythm, moving the audience between clarity and distortion without missing any proverbial beats. We spend most of our time with George Smiley (Gary Oldman), an owlish ex-spy who’s been recruited to, well, spy on his former colleagues: there is a traitor hidden in plain sight, an evil-doer amongst the highest echelon in the British secret service, and by Jove, he’s got to find him before the Russians get us all! Now that you’ve got the basic idea of the film, I’m going to do some secret gesturing (typing) towards major themes in the movie that deserve a second thought, and I think, fundamentally make it an excellent (and thoughtful) film.

As one might assume (since it is a spy movie), sight and seeing are very important in the film (emphasized by an early scene where Smiley gets a new pair of glasses) and it’s this act that we’ve really got to pay attention to. Seeing is believing, right? Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, however, clings to things that are misseen (this is something Alfredson actively makes the audience do, too), things that confuse or deny the gaze. Truly, Smiley’s estranged wife and her sexual dalliances are of huge import in the film, and Alfredson smartly never lets us see her. She is a shadowy form, a veritable ghost that haunts, and it’s her mystery (and the overarching, powerful mystery of sex) that drives the entire movie. Unlike its cheesier genre counterparts (James Bond, for one), where sex is “understood” and for-the-fun-of-it-all, we never see our major characters in bed, we only see the outcome of the act, and just how devastating it can be.

It is also sex that causes much (if not all of) the distortion in the film; otherwise excellent spies are rendered sightless by love (and/or lust) and lose the ability to identify good from bad, leaving them exposed, confused, and angry. Look closely at what titillates and what frustrates, and you’ll see a film that understands the liminality of the spy and his inherent internal split, instead of just his perceived privilege and glamour. Furthermore, Alfredson achieves all of this without resorting to the typical genre stereotypes of the Other—Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s femme fatale isn’t a femme (a fantastic inversion of such a ubiquitous trope), and its portrayal of Russians (and other Others) ebb through the film without much of the expected racial garishness the genre so often embraces.

This is an incredibly nuanced film, one that deserves to be seen (and seen again); so, please do so, and then we can come back to this analysis sans secrecy. In the mean time, be sure to remember that nothing is what it seems, especially in cinema.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will be available for home viewing on March 20, 2012.

By Scotty Barnhart

I’m no Muppet fanatic. I am, however, an appreciator of what the Muppets are about—what they stand for. In a world recurrently cited as cynical, how has the past decade offered no major market for these big eyed, wide mouthed puppets? They exist, after all, to make people laugh. The Muppets (2011) posits this same question.

The franchise’s first Disney-produced theatrical release in fifteen years begins with veteran Muppet fan Gary (Jason Segal) and his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) vacationing to Los Angeles to celebrate their ten year anniversary. Much to Mary’s dismay, Gary brings along his unpopular brother and fellow Muppet enthusiast Walter, himself a Muppet (voiced by Peter Linz). While touring the now defunct Muppets Studio, Walter fortuitously discovers that avaricious oil tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to mine oil from beneath the grounds. In an attempt to save the studio, the trio notifies the most famous Muppet of them all: Kermit the Frog. The four resolve to produce a Muppet Telethon in order to raise the ten million dollars necessary to save their studio. The story then becomes a race against the clock as they ‘travel by map’ to reconstruct the cast of the Muppet Show and successfully broadcast their best show ever.

The film seems to continually address the abovementioned issue: how has the Muppet brand not recently flourished? One of the script’s funniest moments reinforces this as Walter motivates Kermit by telling him, “[the Muppets] give people the greatest gift of all.”

“Children?” Kermit asks.

“No.”

“Ice cream?”

“No. Laughter. Laughter is the third greatest gift of all.”

The Pixar short preceding the film, Small Fry (2011), a continuation of Toy Story 3 (2010), succeeds as a prologue because it too conveys its characters’ end: to be played with.

Who, exactly, does The Muppets make laugh? I’ve viewed the film twice. On separate occasions, a noteworthy amount of children present have lost interest, squirmed, and talked. Conversely, their guardians remained enjoyably sutured. The humor contains a cleverness that adults find funny. In fact, the film’s main failure occurs during Tex Richman’s juvenile rap: a severe fracture in an otherwise strong script.

That adults most enjoy the film could result from co-writers Segal and Nicholas Stoller. The former co-wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), while the latter wrote or co-wrote Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Yes Man (2008), and FSM’s sequel Get Him to the Greek (2010). Or, perhaps, Muppets director James Bobin should be commended. He launched the career of Sacha Baron Cohen and co-created Flight of the Conchords with Muppets music supervisor Bret McKenzie—whose contribution is almost unarguably the film’s greatest attribute.

The Muppets will be available for home viewing on March 20, 2012.