Citizenfour
Feb. 6
Eckerd College Miller Auditorium
This eye-opening verité documentary details filmmaker Laura Poitras’ meetings with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden over eight days in Hong Kong in 2013. Both revelatory and paranoia-inducing, Citizenfour offers a view of the man and the system that typify the twenty-first century information economy. Directed by Laura Poitras (English, 114m, 2014)
Manakamana
Feb. 13
Eckerd College Miller Auditorium
In this meditative documentary, a cable car makes eleven trips to and from the Nepali Manakamana Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Durga, who is believed to have the power to fulfill wishes. We watch as couples, families, adults, children, and animals are transported back and forth from temple and search their faces for the exact moment they transition between the ordinary and the divine. Directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez (Nepali with English subtitles, 118m, 2013)
Mar. 6
When a middle-class husband abandons his wife and child in a moment of seeming mortal danger on a ski vacation in the French alps, the bourgeois family’s perfect facade cracks wide open to reveal how modern attempts to control human nature are just as fraught as those to control the natural world. Directed by Ruben Östlund (Swedish, French, and Norwegian with English subtitles, 118m, 2014)
Mar. 27
Starring Viggo Mortensen (who also co-produced the film and co-composed the score), Lisandro’s sixth feature, an existential western, follows Danish Captain Dinesen (Mortensen), assigned to Argentina’s Patagonia region, as he searches for his daughter and his purpose in the desert. As his daughter asks in the film’s twisty third act, “What makes a life function and move forward?” we watch as Timo Salminen’s cinematography compresses the very frame that contains Dinesen all the while painting a world that is as unknowable as it is beautiful. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Lisandro Alonso (Spanish and Danish with English subtitles, 109m, 2014)
Apr. 10
In 1958, French New Wave film critic and future filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard declared: “cinema is Nicholas Ray.” Ray, an iconoclast who made over twenty feature films, worked within the Hollywood system to assert his own personal vision of modern personhood as a violent conflict between rugged individualism and the demands of human society. This three-film Ray retrospective begins with Ray’s most famous film. Starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, Rebel Without a Causeexplores the gray areas between good and evil, childhood and adulthood, in 1950s America through a single day in the life of teenager Jim Stark (Dean). Directed by Nicholas Ray (English, 11m, 1955)
Cinema is Nicholas Ray I: Bigger Than Life
Apr. 17
Nicholas Ray’s second film after Rebel Without a Cause follows a schoolteacher, husband, and father (Jason Mason) who loses his sense of his place in the world after becoming addicted to cortisone. Shot in saturated Technicolor and widescreen CinemaScope, Bigger Than Life betrays Ray’s interest in cinema as architecture (he studied with Frank Lloyd Wright) as he constructs a visual world increasingly distorted by the main character’s struggle to make the external world mirror his own outsized ego. Directed by Nicholas Ray (English, 95m, 1956)
Cinema is Nicholas Ray I: In a Lonely Place
Apr. 24
Nicholas Ray’s fifth feature stars Humphrey Bogart as a cynical Hollywood screenwriter accused of murder who falls in love with his neighbor, an aspiring actress (Gloria Grahame, Ray’s wife at the time) while the cloud of suspicion hangs over their budding relationship. A rarely screened example of Ray’s early work overshadowed by the more famous meditations on Hollywood celebrity – Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve – released the same year, In a Lonely Place’s improvised ending is the embodiment of Ray’s wish “to capture, in flight, moments of truth, as much by thought as by intuition, instinct, or…too rarely…by flashes of inspiration.” Directed by Nicholas Ray (English, 94m, 1950)
Timbuktu
May 1
Set during the occupation of Timbuktu from 2012 to 2013 by jihadists who imposed sharia law on local Muslim inhabitants, Timbuktu paints a portrait of everyday life in occupied territory. When one local inhabitant accidentally commits a crime and falls victim to the new laws, Timbuktu presents a world torn between ideology and humanism. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (and Mauritania’s first entry into that category), Timbuktu competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize. This film includes scenes of violence (to humans and animals). Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako (French, Arabic, Bambara, Songhay, and English with English subtitles, 97m, 2014)
