Tuesday, August 27 at 7pm
THE SOUVENIR – Exclusive Area Premiere!
Joanna Hogg (UK/U.S. 2019) 119 min. DCP. With Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton.
Acclaimed British writer-director Joanna Hogg’s newest film is a semi-autobiographical chamber drama about love and art. Its protagonist, a shy but ambitious film student (Swinton Byrne) thinks a lot about cinema, and the work of major directors such as Powell & Pressburger resonate through the film (whose visual and narrative style viewers can compare with French filmmaker Robert Bresson — Hogg often cites Bresson as a major influence). The Souvenir’s graceful aesthetics almost dissemble its passionate emotions, the eruptive love story of a fraught relationship that comes dangerously close to destroying a young woman’s dreams.
[The Souvenir] is the kind of film — we all have a collection of these, and of similar books and records, too — that feels like a private discovery, an experience you want to protect rather than talk about… [It also] feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours. — A.O. Scott, The New York Times
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Tuesday, September 3 at 7pm
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN – 80th Anniversary 4K Restoration!
George Marshall (U.S. 1939) DCP. 95 minutes. With Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Mischa Auer.
Released in theatres immediately following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, this classic Western carries an unvarnished message cautioning against US appeasement of the Third Reich. The story of a hard boiled dancehall girl in a gun-crazy town, who falls for a mild-mannered deputy sheriff who never wears a gun features the star presence of Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart. The latter was a rising star, while Dietrich was a troubled figure who hadn’t appeared on screen for two years; Destry Rides Again was a risk she needed to take, and to shed the image of the ethereal Berliner blonde established by her collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, the star traded overhead lighting and diffusion filters for barroom fights and comedy. In addition to Marlene Dietrich, prominent Jewish émigrés also worked on the production, including Felix Jackson (screenplay), Friedrich Holländer (songs, music) and Joseph (Joe) Herman Pasternak (producer) (Berlinale program notes).
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Tuesday, September 10 at 7pm
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD – 4K Restoration!
Alain Resnais (France 1961) 93 minutes. DCP. With Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. French with English subtitles.
Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story. Co-presented by Bucknell’s French & Francophone Studies Program. Introduced by Director and Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies Nathalie Dupont.
THE RAFT – Exclusive Area Premiere!
Marcus Lindeen (Sweden, Denmark, USA, Germany 2019) 97 min. DCP. In English, French, German, Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish with English subtitles.
In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked on an unusual sea voyage — a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali, and initiated by Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés, who proposed to use the group as guinea pigs in his investigation of the origins (and erotics) of violent conflict. Contentious from the get-go, and incorrectly labeled the “Sex Raft” by the media, the Acali mission stayed afloat for 101 days. More than forty years later, the only surviving crew members reunited to reenact and recollect their experience, illustrated with 16mm archival footage from on-board. What results is a document of the thin line between science and cultism, a touching story of female camaraderie and, in the person of Genovés, an unforgettable portrait of oblivious, tyrannical toxic masculinity.
The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature. — Guy Lodge, Variety
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Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm
I AM CUBA – 4K Restoration!
Mikhail Kalatozov (USSR/Cuba 1964) 141 min. DCP. With Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo. Spanish and English with English subtitles.
Begun only a week after the Cuban missile crisis, Mikhail Kalatozov’s deliriously beautiful masterpiece was designed to be Cuba’s answer to both Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda masterpiece Potemkin and Jean-Luc Godard’s freewheeling romance Breathless. But I Am Cuba turned out to be something unique — a wildly schizophrenic celebration of Communist iconography, mixing Slavic solemnity with Latin sensuality. The plot, or rather plots, feverishly explore the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista’s Cuba — juxtaposing images of rich Americans and bikini-clad beauties sipping cocktails poolside with scenes of ramshackle slums filled with hungry children and gaunt old people. Milestone Films first released the film in 1995. Decades later, they have created a brand new restoration from original material. The newly restored I Am Cuba is more ravishing and surreal than ever. Audiences will have no question why this film revolutionized filmmaking in the 1990s and beyond. Co-presented by Bucknell’s Literary Studies program. Introduced by Professor of English Rafe Dalleo in conjunction with his “Caribbean Literature” course.
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Tuesday, October 1 at 7pm
EASY RIDER – 50th Anniversary 4K Restoration! 
Dennis Hopper (U.S. 1969) 95 min. DCP. With Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black.
This definitive counterculture blockbuster has been restored and returned to audiences (the restoration premiered at Cannes in May, and even received a rare nationwide theatrical re-release in July). The down-and-dirty directorial debut of former clean-cut teen star Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider heralded the arrival of a new voice in film, one pitched angrily against the mainstream. After the film’s cross-country journey — with its radical editing, outsider-rock soundtrack, revelatory performance by a young Jack Nicholson, and explosive ending—the American road trip would never be the same. Restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna.
After Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Easy Rider completed the trinity of films that forced Hollywood studios to sit up and take notice of a burgeoning American New Wave. — Richard Armstrong, The Rough Guide to Film
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Tuesday, October 8 at 7pm
HYENAS – 2K Restoration!
Djibril Diop Mambéty (Senegal 1992) 110 Min. DCP. With Mansour Diouf, Ami Diakhate, Mahouredia Gueye. In Wolof & French with English subtitles.
One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambéty’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki (1973) is a hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which in Mambéty’s imagining follows a nowrich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by western materialism. Introduced by Visiting Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies Andrew Jones.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM! –Filmmaker in Person!
Bostjan Virc (Germany, Qatar, Slovenia, Croatia 2016) 88 min. DCP. Croatian, English, Serbian, Slovene with English subtitles.
Deftly combining archival footage with modern-day interviews with philosopher Slavoj Žižek and some of the key figures in the film’s investigation— including a former Yugoslavian space engineer, an American historian, and a retired Yugoslav People’s Army general—Houston, We Have a Problem! is a fascinating meta-examination of Cold War foreign diplomacy and myth-building, and the lies, manipulation, and dirty games that go into the construction of a national identity. (Tribeca Film Festival program notes). Introduced by history professor John Enyeart. Co-sponsored by Bucknell’s Provost’s Office and History Department.
ARCHIVAL SCREENING NIGHT!
Multiple directors (Various countries and years) Total run time 110 min. DCP.
For the first time ever, what has been since 1991 a special members-only Association of Moving Image Archivists event is being made accessible to the public: now we all can see the incredible, strange, astonishing, hilarious and curious treasures from the world’s moving image archives. This cinematic Cabinet of Wonders features a wonderful promotion for a lost Thai film, a bizarre anti-drug commercial with Alice in Wonderland, a banned experimental film from Albania, Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston in wooden clogs, a commercial to buy your own Stonewall action figures, and many more surprises and delights!
TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM – Exclusive Area Premiere !
Timothy-Greenfield Sanders (U.S. 2019) 120 min. DCP.
The Pieces I Am offers an artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of the acclaimed novelist. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to ‘70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition as seen through the prism of her own literature. Co-presented by Bucknell’s Griot Institute in connection with several readings and events planned for 2019-2020 in memoriam and celebration of Morrison. Introduced by Kelsey Hicks, Director of Bucknell’s Women’s Resource Center.
SOBIBÓR, OCTOBER 14, 1943, 4 P.M – Special Guest Michael Renov !
Claude Lanzmann (France 2001) 95 min. DCP. French and Hebrew with English subtitles.
The subject of a retrospective at New York City’s Quad Cinema in 2018, Claude Lanzmann changed cinema; with his most famous film, Shoah (screening in Bucknell’s Gallery Theater on Saturday November 2nd), Lanzmann established his cinematic legacy as historian, keeper of the flame, educator and truth-teller. All too aware that there was more to be done in the face of indifference and/or misinformation, Lanzmann continued for decades to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about 20th-century Jewish experience as well as the art of documentary. In Sobibor, he interviews Yehuda Lerner, who survived the Shoah and escaped from multiple concentration camps. One such incident, at the titular camp/day/time, was an inmate uprising in which several guards were killed before the prisoners fled into the nearby woods. While unique in Lanzmann’s oeuvre because of its focus on resistance and survival, the film also confronts the reality of the death camps’ years-long toll (Adapted from Quad Cinema program notes). Introduced by Michael Renov, Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary for the Division of Cinema & Media Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Screening as part of DAYIENU! Beyond Survival There is Hope, a week of workshops, lectures, films and performances establishing the relevance of Holocaust education.
78/52: HITCHCOCK’S SHOWER SCENE
Alexandre O. Philippe (U.S. 2017) 92 min. DCP.
The screeching strings, the plunging knife, the slow zoom out from a lifeless eyeball: in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed film history forever with its taboo-shattering shower scene. With 78 camera set-ups and 52 edits over the course of 3 minutes, Psycho redefined screen violence, set the stage for decades of slasher films to come, and introduced a new element of danger to the moviegoing experience. Aided by a roster of filmmakers, critics, and fans director Alexandre O. Philippe pulls back the curtain on the making and influence of this cinematic game changer, breaking it down frame by frame and unpacking Hitchcock’s dense web of allusions and double meanings. The result is an enthralling piece of cinematic detective work that’s nirvana for film buffs. Introduced by Film/ Media Studies professor Eric Faden in connection with his course “Writing Through Film & Media.”
JESUS, YOU KNOW
Ulrich Seidl (Austria 2003) 87 min. 35MM. German with English subtitles.
Controversial Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s bold and uncomfortably intimate journey into faith and humanity is an “unblinking exploration of one of the most private of human experiences” (The New York Times). Recording six Catholics—of different ages, backgrounds and genders—in a series of confessional dialogues with Jesus (and an omnipresent movie camera), Jesus, You Know is a “deeply moving documentary of Catholics at prayer” (The Village Voice).
PLAYING WITH
THY KINGDOM COME
Eugene Richards (U.S. 2018) 42 min. DCP.
Thy Kingdom Come was conceived following the filming of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. As part of that production’s “third unit,” photographer/filmmaker Eugene Richards introduced actor/producer Javier Bardem, who was portraying a parish priest in Malick’s film, to the real-life residents of a small Oklahoma town. What had been intended as brief episodes for the feature film grew in scope as the townspeople, wholly aware that he was a fictional priest, chose to share personal details of their lives. Co-presented by Bucknell’s Department of Religious Studies. Introduced by Professor of Religious Studies John Penniman.
THE HOTTEST AUGUST – Exclusive Area Premiere!
Brett Story (U.S. 2019) 94 min. DCP.
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives. Co-presented with the Bucknell Center for Sustainability and the Environment. Introduced by Milton Newberry III, Director of Sustainable Technology at the BCSE.
Tuesday, December 10 at 7pm
END OF SEMESTER SHOWCASE!
Please join us for Bucknell’s end-of-semester student film screening. Students enrolled in “Introduction to Film/Media Production” will be sharing the world premiere unveiling of their final films with the Lewisburg and Bucknell community. A range of approaches and topics are explored in these short form videos.