SPRING 2008
Friday evenings, 7:30 p.m. (Unless otherwise noted)
Page Hall, 135 Western Ave., UAlbany’s Downtown Campus

KILLER OF SHEEP
February 8 (Friday)

(U.S., 1977, 83 minutes, b&w, 35 mm)
Directed by Charles Burnett
Starring Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy


A radically inventive, dream-like portrait of a Black slaughterhouse worker as he experiences everyday life in South Central L.A., this film was declared a “national treasure” by the Library of Congress, and was selected by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the “100 essential films” of all time. Shown in a much-anticipated director’s cut that was re-released to theatres in 2007.


SHOLAY
February 29 (Friday) NOTE: 7:00pm Start Time

(India, 1975, 188 minutes, color, DVD, in Hindi with English subtitles)
Directed by Ramesh Sippy
Starring Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan


Loosely inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s THE SEVEN SAMURAI, and combining relentless action with lively song-and-dance numbers, SHOLAY is widely-considered one of the greatest films of Bollywood cinema. A police officer from a small village in rural India recruits two small-time crooks to help him fight the notorious bandit who murdered his family.


DRAGONWYCK
March 7 (Friday)

(U.S., 1946, 103 minutes, b&w, 35 mm)
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price


Set in the Albany area, this campy Gothic melodrama tells the tale of a young woman who goes to live with rich, possibly murderous relatives in a Hudson Valley mansion. Based on the novel by Anya Seton, the film represents Joseph Mankiewicz’s directorial debut. The peculiar Van Ryn family is based on the Capital Region’s Van Rensselaer family.


CLANDO
March 14 (Friday)

(Cameroon, 1996, 90 minutes, color, 35 mm, in French with English subtitles)
Directed by Jean-Marie Téno
Starring Paulin Fodouop, Henriette Fenda, Caroline Redl


In this acclaimed feature film an African computer programmer gets caught up in a web of corruption and political intrigue. Jean-Marie Téno, award-winning, socially-conscious filmmaker, explores the political kleptocracy and bitter colonial legacy of his native country of Cameroon, the only African country to be colonized by three European powers: Germany, France, and Britain. The prestigious Toronto Film Festival bills the Paris-based Téno as “one of the best documentarians alive” and “one of African cinema’s most exciting directors.” Téno’s work has frequently been censored in Cameroon and banned from state-owned television.


MAD DOG AND GLORY
April 4 (Friday)

(U.S., 1993, 97 minutes, color, 35 mm)
Directed by John McNaughton
Starring Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Bill Murray


Street-smart novelist Richard Price (who will appear at the Writers Institute on April 10 —see listing on page 13) showcases his gift for dialogue in this comedy about a shy cop who saves the life of a mob boss and is rewarded with the problematic “gift” of a beautiful woman. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it, an “unconscionably enjoyable movie that plays like something conceived by a contemporary, furiously hip Damon Runyon.”


The Big Read Project
AGE OF INNOCENCE
April 11 (Friday) NOTE: 7:00pm Start Time

(U.S., 1993, 139 minutes, color, 35 mm)
Directed by Martin Scorcese
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder

A sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of sex and social scandal among New York’s upper classes in the 1870s. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that director Martin Scorsese “sweeps us away on waves of dizzying eroticism and rapturous romance.” Wharton scholar, Nancy Lewis, whose husband R.W.B. Lewis, served as a consultant on the script, will offer commentary immediately after the screening.

Nancy Lewis is an American studies scholar who collaborated frequently with her late husband, R. W. B. Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the landmark biography, Edith Wharton (1975). Together, the Lewises co-edited The Letters of Edith Wharton (1989), a collection of nearly 400 pieces of correspondence that show the great American novelist “at her epistolary best.” Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it a “meticulously edited volume” that adds “depth and chiaroscuro” to the known details of Wharton’s life.
"The Big Read" project encourages every member of the Capital Region to read a single book. This year’s selection is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. "The Big Read" is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest.


LA BÊTE HUMAINE
April 18 (Friday)

(France, 1938, 100 minutes, b&w, DVD, in French with English subtitles)
Directed by Jean Renoir
Starring Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux, Julien Carette


A train engineer, given to fits of violence, falls for a kittenish station-master’s wife in this dark, atmospheric, pre-film noir treatment of Emile Zola’s novel by master-director Jean Renoir. A classic of poetic realism and “proletarian” cinema, the film features “stunning images of trains and railway lines as a metaphor for the blind, immutable forces that drive human passions to destruction” (Time Out New York).


THE LOST CITY
April 25 (Friday)

(U.S., 2005, 143 minutes, color, 35 mm, in English and Spanish with English subtitles)
Directed by Andy Garcia
Starring Andy Garcia, Inés Sastre, Tomas Milian


Sixteen years in the making and based on a screenplay by the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, this lavish epic follows the fortunes of Havana’s glitzy nightclub set during and after Castro’s revolution. Many critics view the film as a flawed masterpiece, a Cuban DOCTOR ZHIVAGO intercut with spectacular cabaret performances, “a musical fever dream of Paradise Lost” (The Seattle Times).

THE FACE OF ANOTHER
May 2 (Friday)

(Japan, 1966, 124 minutes, b&w, 35 mm, in Japanese with English subtitles)
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Machiko Kyô, Mikijiro Hira


In this low-budget horror classic, a man disfigured by an industrial fire persuades a doctor to give him a new face. Along with it, he adopts a new and dangerously unstable personality. Strictly Film School (filmref.com) calls the film, “a haunting, cautionary fairytale of masquerade and revelation, defect and vanity, impersonation and self-discovery.” Shown in a newly restored print.


CITY LIGHTS
May 9 (Friday)

(U.S., 1931, 87 minutes, b&w, 35 mm)
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers

Silent Film

Both moving and laugh-out-loud funny, Chaplin’s slapstick masterpiece about the love affair between a “tramp” and a blind flower girl will be screened in a newly restored print. The Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr called it, “A beautiful example of Chaplin’s ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes.... as eccentric as it is sublime.”






CONTACT INFORMATION
Science Library, SL 320 | University at Albany, NY 12222 | Phone 518-442-5620 | Fax 518-442-5621 | email writers @uamail.albany.edu