THE TSUGUA DIARIES – Area Premiere!
Directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (Portugal 2021)102 min. DCP. With Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta, João Nunes Monteiro. In Portuguese and Romanian with English subtitles.
A wistful and sunny antidote to lockdown blues, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s infectious summer tale blurs the line between cinema and life. Shot on 16mm in sun-soaked Sintra (during Portugal’s lockdown in August 2020), The Tsugua Diaries observes the daily lives of three friends passing their time in a spacious farmhouse, where the dog days of summer are filled with dancing, chores, disturbed sleep patterns, building projects, the sound of cicadas, and flirtations. As the film progresses, we near the diaries’ origin, revealing cinema as a form of life and love to combat darkness and solitude. The Tsugua Diaries is a hangout film in the process of being at once made and unmade, where the line between life and cinema is enchantingly hazy. While it may have begun as an “in between” project, it succeeds as a triumph of the imagination and is one of the most restorative films of the year. (Adapted from TIFF program notes). A NYFF59 selection and KimStim release.
“A work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus… [The Tsugua Diaries remarkably demonstrates] how to transmute the constraints of pandemic-era moviemaking into a film with humor and, during a time marred by isolation, a sense of real togetherness.”– Beandrea July, The New York Times
THEY CALLED US ENEMY
In conjunction with Bucknell’s First Year Reading of George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, this program reflects on the imprisonment of people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps during World War II. A panel conversation with follow the films. Panelists: Rebecca Meyers (Film/Media Studies), Chase Gregory (Literary Studies) and Abhishek Nanavati (East Asian Studies).
The featured short is Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (U.S. 1991) 32 min. Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. Groundbreaking and haunting, History and Memory is a rumination on the difficult nature of representing the past – especially a past that exists outside traditional historic accounts. Tajiri blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family’s house removed from its site. Drawing from a variety of sources (Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, memories of the living, and spirits of the dead) the film calls attention to the gaps in the story of the Japanese American internment, and raises important questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost. History and Memory plays with Double Solitaire (Corey Ohama, U.S. 1998, 20 min.) which uses the motif of games to tell the story of the filmmaker’s Japanese-American father and uncle’s incarceration as children in an internment camp during WWII, and the legacy of that experience.
“Tajiri approaches her subject like a poet. She weaves together images and allows them to enrich one another in skewed and subtle ways as their resonances slowly emerge.” – Caryn James, New York Times
A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Directed by Daniel Petrie (U.S. 1961) 128 min. 35MM. With Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands.
Daniel Petrie’s faithful adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play was released the year of the Freedom Rides through the American South, and was exceptional for Hollywood in that it challenged white audiences with its forthrightness about systemic racism – a topic avoided even by the social dramas that were dealing with race in the 50s and 60s. Hansberry’s landmark vision of black family life, in which a husband and father living in poverty on Chicago’s South Side tries to move his family to the suburbs, features one of Sidney Poitier’s defining performances. Introduced by Jaye Austin Williams, Professor of Performance Studies, Critical Black Studies, and Theatre & Dance, in conjunction with her course “Radical Black Drama & Performance.”
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Tuesday, September 13 at 7pm
MUNA MOTO – Recent Restoration! Anna Thorngate in Person!
Directed by Dikongué-Pipa (Cameroon, 1975) 85 min. DCP. With David Endene, Arlette Din Bell, Jeanne Mvondo. Basaa, Duala and French with English subtitles.
The director of Cameroon’s first full-length feature film, Dikongué-Pipa forged a new African cinematic language with Muna Moto, a delicate love story with profound emotional resonance. In a close-knit village in Cameroon, the rigid customs governing courtship and marriage mean that a deeply in love betrothed couple can be torn apart by the lack of a dowry and by another man’s claiming of the young woman as his own wife—a rupture that sets the stage for a clash between a patriarchal society and a modern generation’s determination to chart its own course. Luminous black-and-white cinematography and stylistic flourishes yield images of haunting power in this potent depiction, told via flashback, of the challenges of postcolonialism and the devastating consequences of a community’s refusal to deviate from tradition. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, created by The Film Foundation, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Introduced by Anna Thorngate, Senior Editor at the Criterion Collection.
VENGEANCE IS MINE – Re-Release!
Directed by Michael Roemer (U.S. 1984) 118 min. DCP. With Brooke Adams, Trish Van Devere, Ari Meyers and Jon De Vries.
Originally released on television as an American Playhouse episode under the title “Haunted,” Michael Roemer’s Vengeance is Mine is the major American cinema rediscovery of 2022. The story, ever veering toward darkness, follows Brooke Adams, who befriends her neighbor Trish Van Devere after a disastrous visit with her family at her childhood home in Rhode Island. While becoming more involved with her new friend, she finds herself caught in another family drama.
“Fantastic, not to mention fantastical… The film’s introductory breeziness belies a literary, cinematic complexity. Barbara Taylor Bradford clothes on a John Updike body, Ingmar Bergman by way of Phil Donahue…what you’ll witness is an American movie executed with a French film’s interpersonal insouciance.” – Wesley Morris, The New York Times
“One of the masters of American cinema. Don’t miss this.” – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
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Tuesday, September 27 at 7pm
A STAR IS BORN – Judy Garland Centennial!
Directed by George Cukor (U.S. 1954) 176 min. 35MM. With Charles Bickford, Jack Carson, James Mason, Judy Garland.
Movie theaters and concert halls across the country have recently been marking the 100th anniversary of Judy Garland’s birth (June 10, 1922). One of cinema’s most memorable and beloved performers, the incomparable Judy Garland’s motion picture career is unsurpassed in its timeless, classic amalgam of singing, dancing, comedy, and drama. A Star is Born (the first remake, followed by a 1976 vehicle starting Barbara Streisand, and then the 2019 Lady Gaga box office smash) was Garlands comeback vehicle ( after MGM cancelled her contract in 1950). Its telling of a one start eclipsing another gives us Garland as a talented new actress who falls in love with an older star (Mason) – one whose career is on the decline due to alcoholism. Garland was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, and the film features a collection of songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin which would become Garland standards.
ADOPTION – Restoration and Re-Release!
Márta Mészáros (Hungary 1975) 86 min. DCP. With Katalin Berek, Gyöngyvér Vígh, László Szabó. Hungarian with English subtitles.
Trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing slice-of-life drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Through intensely intimate camerawork, Mészáros immerses the viewer in the worlds two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata (Berek), a middle-aged factory worker who wishes to have a child with her married lover, and Anna (Vigh), a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women’s lives as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.
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Tuesday, October 18 at 7pm
Dope, Hookers and Pavement: The Real and Imagined History of Detroit Hardcore – Director in Person!
Directed by Otto Buj (U.S. 2020) 133 min. DCP.
Dope, Hookers and Pavement is a lively and unfiltered account of the early days of the Detroit hardcore punk scene, circa 1981-82, in the notorious Cass Corridor, arguably one of the worst neighborhoods in the city at the time. It took a small, seriously committed throng of white, suburban teens and skater kids to get down there and make that scene happen – but not without first doing a few one-off gigs in Detroit’s gay bars and a critical stint at the Coronation Tavern in Windsor, Ontario before converging on the Corridor for their now-mythical residency at the ramshackle Freezer Theatre. Featuring over 70 in-depth interviews – including John Brannon (Negative Approach), Tesco Vee (Meatmen, Touch and Go), Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Dischord Records), pro skater Bill Danforth, scene kids, and members of the Necros, The Fix, Violent Apathy and Bored Youth – and never-before-seen Super8 footage of the Freezer, Dope, Hookers and Pavement is both hilarious and reflective, and an overdue record of a nearly invisible but magic little moment in the long history of Detroit rock’n’roll. This screening is co-sponsored with the departments of Philosophy, History, Comparative Humanities, and Sociology & Anthropology, in conjunction with Philosophy professor Pete Groff’s class Punk. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Groff and the film’s director, Otto Buj!
“The early ‘80s Detroit hardcore scene, which played out at the Freezer, was the true epicentre of total punk in the USA. With a bunch of creative, alien kids in working-class Michigan finding one another and unleashing a catalog of totally amazing tunes, it was the blueprint for radical punk that’s still going strong today. Dope, Hookers and Pavement lets everyone who made the scene state their case and connects the dots. This is anti-fascist, anti-authority collective energy as real as a stick of dynamite.” – Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
Tuesday, October 25 at 7pm
THE CONFORMIST – Restoration!
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy 1970) 111 min. DCP. With Dominique Sanda, Gastone Moschin, Stefania Sandrelli, Jean-Louis Trintignant. Italian with English subtitles.
In Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode–and murder–joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller’s anthology pieces, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. Introduced by Philosophy professor Adam Burgos, in conjunction with his class “Speech, Propaganda, and Ideology.”
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Tuesday, November 1 at 7pm
NOSFERATU – 100th Anniversary! Preceded by the winner and runner up of the Film Club’s 24-Hour Film Challenge!!!
Directed by F.W. Murnau (Germany 1922) 94 min. DCP. With Dominique Sanda, Gastone Moschin, Stefania Sandrelli, Jean-Louis Trintignant.
An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a cornerstone of horror and silent cinema alike, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror remains to many viewers the most unsettling vampire film ever made, and its bald, spidery vampire, personified by the diabolical Max Schreck, continues to spawn imitations in the realm of contemporary cinema.
Presented in an HD edition mastered from the acclaimed 35mm restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. Backed by an orchestral performance of Hans Erdmann’s 1922 score. Presented by the Bucknell Film Club!
“Nosferatu’s influence on cinema cannot be overstated. It is the ground-zero of cinematic horror and after 100 years it is still revered by critics and fans alike.” – The Independent
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Tuesday, November 8 at 7pm
ROCK BOTTOM RISER – Filmmaker in Person!
Directed by Fern Silva (U.S. 2021) 70 min. 35MM.
From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight, to present-day astronomers scanning the cosmos for habitable planets, explorers have long made Hawaii the hub for their searching. Today—as lava continues to flow on the island—another crisis mounts as scientists plan to build the world’s largest telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s most sacred and revered mountain.
In his dynamic feature debut, Fern Silva examines myriad encounters with an island world at sea. Drawing from subjects as seemingly disparate as the arrival of Christian missionaries and the controversial casting of Dwayne Johnson as King Kamehameha, the film weaves a vital tapestry of post-colonialism and pop culture with cinematic brio and a wry wit. Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy. Fern Silva’s visit is made possible thanks to funding provided by the University Lectureship Committee and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
– Slant Magazine
Tuesday, November 15 at 7pm
RUSSIAN ARK
Aleksandr Sokurov (Russia 2002) 99 min. DCP. With Sergey Dreyden, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy. Russian with English subtitles.
Sokurov’s magnum opus is a cinematic technical feat. Consisting entirely of a single roving Steadicam shot, the film narrates three hundred years of Russian history come to life in the Hermitage Museum. Over 2,000 actors appear in the meticulously choreographed sequences as, again and again, performers break the fourth wall, interacting in novel ways though the scene never cuts to break the steady, unrelenting momentum of historical hypnosis. Introduced by Professor Lenora Murphy, Bucknell’s Russian Studies Program.
Every Man For Himself
Jean-Luc Godard (France 1980) 88 min. 35MM. With Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc and Nathalie Baye. French with English subtitles.
After a decade in the wilds of avant-garde and early video experimentation, Jean-Luc Godard returned to commercial cinema with this star-driven work of social commentary, while remaining defiantly intellectual and formally cutting-edge. Every Man for Himself, featuring a script by Jean-Claude Carrière and Anne-Marie Miéville, looks at the sexual and professional lives of three people—a television director (Dutronc), his ex-girlfriend (Baye), and a prostitute (Huppert) — to create a meditative story about work, relationships, and the notion of freedom. Made twenty years into his career, it was, Godard said, his “second first film.”
“A masterpiece of contemporary aimlessness in furious motion. Every image is suffused with such elegant and exquisite insights into what makes the medium interact with its material that the total effect is intoxicating.” — Andrew Sarris, Village Voice
“Godard’s brilliant new comedy…a stunning, original work… breathtakingly beautiful and often very funny… I trust it will outlive us all.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“The latest lovely, desperate film by one of the most brilliant filmmakers alive…should be seen by everyone interested in movies or in life, without hesitation or delay.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Soho Times
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Tuesday, December 6 at 7:30pm
2022 Student Showcase! World Premieres!
Featuring Films By: Raf Muniz, Tristan An, Emily Williamson, Matt Mills, Abby Seaman, Thao Nguyen, Alex Marx, Max Gilbert, Dehlia Rotchford, Jamie Granato, Mac MacLean, Branson Wilson & ENFS 140