Great Flicks for spring 2004!
The following is a list of movies the Great Flicks series will be screening during the Spring semester.
Wednesday, 21 January, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(Pasolini, 1964)
This Italian adaptation, emphasizing realism and employing many nonprofessional actors, is often praised for its charismatic, powerful Christ and unusual adherence to the original text. The result is an emotional, sometimes meditative presentation of Jesus as a revolutionary force in the world.
Wednesday, 4 February, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Sense & Sensibility
(Lee, 1995)
The director of The Hulk and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon turns his attention to another story of powerfully repressed emotion. Emma Thompson not only leads the talented cast in this adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, but also wrote the screenplay.
Wednesday, 18 February, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Daughters of the Dust
(Dash, 1991)
Set in 1902 among the African-American coastal communities of South Carolina and Georgia, Julie Dash’s film takes a circular, nonchronological approach to its story of race and gender tensions in the South. The story centers on a matriarchal family facing challenges from many directions.
Wednesday, 3 March, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Rashomon
(Kurosawa, 1950)
Arguably the first great masterpiece from Akira Kurosawa, Japan’s greatest director. Despite the ancient setting and samurai characters, Japan’s postwar woes and tensions are very much on display in this story of a terrible crime recounted afterwards by various participants—the criminal, the witnesses, even the victim speaking through a medium. Since their accounts differ wildly, how can the truth be found?
Wednesday, 17 March, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Picnic at Hanging Rock
(Weir, 1975)
The first film from Peter Weir, arguably the best filmmaker ever to come out of Australia, is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. It tells the story of a group of students who disappear in the Australian Outback in 1900—but has become famous less for its narrative than for the haunting, mysterious way in which the story is told.
Wednesday, 7 April, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Brazil
(Gilliam, 1985)
Terry Gilliam was the American member of Monty Python, and this, his
greatest film, is sometimes described as Monty Python’s 1984.
While there are Pythonesque elements of wild humor, this story of life
in an absurd, futuristic—but oddly familiar—totalitarian
nightmare state is ultimately much deeper and more moving. Sam Lowry
is a befuddled bureaucrat content to live in his heroic daydreams until
he falls in love with a woman who may be a terrorist—defined here
as someone who might bomb a shopping center or fix your air conditioning
without the proper authorization forms.
Wednesday, 21 April, 7:30 p.m., HC 1203
Elizabeth
(Kapur, 1998)
This is not a Shakespearean adaptation, but a film that attempts to convey what Shakespeare’s world was like—without the winking and in-jokes of Shakespeare in Love. Dealing primarily with the early years of Elizabeth’s rule, the tensions of being a female ruler in a patriarchal society, and the various political maneuvers and plots that surrounded her, the movie by Indian director Shekhar Kapur views its subject from a compelling, postcolonial distance.
Questions about this pageLast updated December 4, 2003