New Event! Sacco & Vanzetti Brown Bag Lunch 2/21

You are invited to bring your lunch to the following free events:

February 21 (Tuesday): THE TRIALS AND EXECUTIONS OF SACCO AND VANZETTI...
Discussion-- 12:15 pm, Husted Hall, Room 014, University at Albany Downtown Campus
Moderator: Frankie Bailey, Ph.D. – Professor of Criminal Justice
Panelists: Gerald Zahavi, Ph.D. – Professor of History, “The Anarchist World of Sacco and Vanzetti”
Richard Hamm, Ph.D. – Professor of History, “What the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Meant to One Legal Liberal”
Picture:  Ben Shahn's Sacco and Vanzetti
Sponsored by the School of Criminal Justice’s “Crime and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century”
series in association with Friday’s free upcoming film event:

February 24 (Friday): SACCO AND VANZETTI
Film screening followed by a conversation with director Peter Miller and film editor Amy Linton — 7:00 p.m. [note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Peter Miller (United States, 2006, 80 minutes, color)
This documentary, winner of the American Historical Association’s best film award, tells the story of two Italian politically radical immigrants charged with the 1920 robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory and the murder of two of its employees. As it recounts their trials, public protests, and appeals on their behalf the film offers insights into present-day issues of civil liberties and immigrant rights. Ken Burns called it “A wonderful film, as timeless as the struggle for human justice, as relevant as today’s headlines.”
Peter Miller is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose films include the theatrically-released A.K.A. DOC POMUS, JEWS AND BASEBALL, and SACCO AND VANZETTI. He has directed numerous documentaries for PBS and has been a producer for documentaries by Ken Burns and Lynn Novak including THE WAR and JAZZ, and the Peabody Award-winning FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.
Amy Linton has edited numerous award-winning films including Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, a Sundance winner that was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. She has worked on dozens of documentaries, feature films, and music videos in her 25-year career.
Sponsored by the Writers Institute in conjunction with UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s Justice & Multiculturalism in the 21st Century: Crime, Justice, and Public Memory Film Series

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A Silent Film Speaks Loudly

Read Amy Biancolli's article about the rediscovered and restored African American silent film classic, Within Our Gates, to be screened tonight at Page Hall at 7:30:

"Within Our Gates" was made almost a century ago, but its message still trembles with urgency. All people are equal. All races are human. All children deserve a good education, and all parents deserve a hope and a chance.

None of that should classify as revolutionary, should it? None of it should need to be said. And yet it's impossible to watch Oscar Micheaux's germinal work — the earliest surviving feature by an African-American filmmaker — without finding immediate and manifest parallels with issues still facing the nation.

Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Early-work-of-black-cinema-to-be-screened-at-10938670.php

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William Wellman Film Festival in the Times Union

Amy Biancolli blogs our upcoming William A. Wellman Film Festival in the Times Union:

A mini-festival of five movies from the long-running, wide-ranging career of Hollywood heydey director William A. Wellman forms the core of this spring’s classic film series offered by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, which has announced its slate of free movies and related events for the upcoming season.

The run of Wellman films opens with rat-a-tat gangster saga “The Public Enemy” on Friday, Jan. 30, and concludes on Friday, May 1, with a reading and discussion by the director’s son, William Wellman Jr., an actor and author of the forthcoming biography “Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel.” “Wings,” Wellman’s soaring, silent 1927 Oscar winner (the first ever) depicting World War I fighter pilots, will screen on Friday, April 24. Also in the festival: “The Public Enemy,” “Nothing Sacred” and “Beau Geste.”

Besides the helpings of Wellman, other films in the springtime lineup at Page Hall include Tanya Hamilton’s 2010 Black Panther drama “Night Catches Us,” Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing” (screened in conjunction with an April 13 Writers Institute appearance by Shakespeare & Company founder Tina Packer) and the classic 1939 iteration of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” from another legendary Hollywood Bill, William Wyler.

In the TU:   http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts/wellman-festival-anchors-writers-institute-spring-movie-series/36137/

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New Spring Series!

You are invited to attend our Spring 2015 series of free events.

The Visiting Writers Series will feature  social critic Katha Pollitt, major novelist Alice McDermott, celebrated New Yorker proofreader Mary Norris, rising literary stars Yelena Akhtiorskaya and Elisa Albert, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, major American poet Alicia Ostriker, prize-winning Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, Shakespeare authority and stage actress Tina Packer, a celebration of local civil rights crusader Barbara Smith, and many other events!

The Classic Film Series will feature young prize-winning director Tanya Hamilton (Night Catches Us), theater and film producer Ron Simons (winner of Tony Awards for for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder; Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike; and the 2012 Porgy & Bess), prize-winning documentary filmmaker Jason Osder (Let the Fire Burn), and William Wellman, Jr., son and biographer of legendary Hollywood director William A. Wellman, whose career spanned four decades, from the Silent Era to the 1950s.

For more on the Visiting Writers Series visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VK1HZF8o7s0

For more on the Classic Film Series visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.VK1Hfl8o7s0

We hope to see you soon!

Best regards and Happy New Year,

The New York State Writers Institute

For more information, visit our website at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VK1JEF8o7s1 and our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/ , or call us at 518-442-5620.

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Exterminating Angel: "Like rats in an overpopulation study"

Friday's film at Page Hall is Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962)-- part of the Food, Crime and Justice film series, cosponsored by the School of Criminal Justice. William Kennedy, novelist, screenwriter and Institute Executive Director, and Donald Faulkner, Institute Director, will provide commentary after the film.

Here's a review and reassessment by the late Roger Ebert that appeared in May 1997:

The dinner guests arrive twice. They ascend the stairs and walk through the wide doorway, and then they arrive again--the same guests, seen from a higher camera angle. This is a joke and soon we will understand the punch line: The guests, having so thoroughly arrived, are incapable of leaving.

Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) is a macabre comedy, a mordant view of human nature that suggests we harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets. Take a group of prosperous dinner guests and pen them up long enough, he suggests, and they'll turn on one another like rats in an overpopulation study.

More: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-exterminating-angel-1962

More about the event:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#angel

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Enthralling theater and television....

“Enthralling theater and television… This is dramatized legal history of the best kind,” said New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante of Friday's film, Thurgood, 7:30 p.m. at Page Hall, 9/20.

Bellafante approaches this piece of filmed theater skeptically at first, but is wildly enthusiastic by the end of her review:

"As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial."

Full review here:  http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/arts/television/24thurgood.html?_r=0

Full Classic Film Series schedule here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

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Taiwanese Film Friday

"This is one of the most gorgeous and maturely composed movies you'll see this year. I've rarely held my breath in anticipation of a director's next shot, each being a small movie unto itself. Working with the cinematographer Liao Ben-bong, Tsai finds a dozen amazing ways to experience a movie, like the scene where we find our intrepid ticket-taker watching ''Dragon Inn" so close that its projected image pours through the perforations in the screen and dots her face. There are so many textures that are exposed in a mere decision about how near to or far from a person to place a camera. You're reminded, in a way that only a great movie can, that such decisions produce an inexplicable magic, and that Tsai Ming-Liang, in addition to being a sterling director, is a superior magician."

Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe reviews Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which will be screened this Friday....

Read more:  http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2004/10/29/say_hello_to_an_eerily_exquisite_movie/

More on the film series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#goodbye

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Silent film set in Coney Island at Page Hall tonight

Film researcher Jason Altman shares some interesting details on the Criterion film website about the making of Lonesome (tonight, Page Hall, 7:30 pm, free with live musical accompaniment).

"Universal’s press book admits that (with the exception of some introductory stock footage of the actual Coney Island, where the film is set) Lonesome was actually shot at 'Venice [California], the Coney Island of the Pacific Coast.'”

"The Venice midway did not have a roller coaster with parallel tracks, which Fejos needed in order to shoot the key scene in the film where Jim and Mary are separated. So one minute the pair are in the arcade in Venice, and the next they get on the Jack Rabbit Racer, which was actually located at a Long Beach amusement park."

"Because cameraman Gilbert Warrenton had to photograph the roller coaster scenes at night, he used the first car of the ride to carry not only a camera but also lights, along with the heavy batteries that powered them. That amount of weight at the front end of the train, as Warrenton told film historian Kevin Brownlow, caused the wheels to repeatedly leave the tracks and come crashing back down."

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NYT's Dave Kehr reviews Lonesome

The rediscovered silent film treasure, Lonesome, which will be screened free at Page Hall 7:30pm, 9/21, with live musical accompaniment, is reviewed by silent film enthusiast Dave Kehr in the New York Times:

“Lonesome” came along at a time of great creative ferment in the film world, when the Germans, led by F. W Murnau, were developing the possibilities of long takes and elaborate camera movements (Mordaunt Hall, the film critic for The New York Times, reviewed “Lonesome” in the same Oct. 7, 1928, column in which he covered Murnau’s now lost American film "Four Devils"; the Soviets were extending the possibilities of cutting to new expressive heights in films like Sergei Eisenstein’s "October"; and the French, led by Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, were exploring the superimposition of images, among other techniques, to create a loosely defined school of cinematic Impressionism.

 

“Lonesome” incorporates all of these techniques — Fejos was clearly a voracious and discerning filmgoer — at the same time it embraces the latest technology. Although completed as a silent and briefly released as one, “Lonesome” was recalled and refitted with three dialogue sequences, in addition to an unusually dense synchronized music and sound effects track.

 

More.

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