April 2009 Archives

Temple University Cinematheque presents
A Double-Feature of Unorthodox Noir Films

The Bewitched
dir. Arch Oboler, 1945, 65 mins, black & white

This very unusual noir about a young woman struggling with a murderous split personality remains unavailable on DVD. Take this rare opportunity to see a film by the multitalented Oboler who, like Orson Welles, started in radio and once incited a public panic by detailing the horror of a giant, undulating chicken heart!


Chan is Missing
dir. Wayne Wang, 1982, 75 mins, black & white

Ostensibly a noirish quest for a missing business partner, this independent feature actually becomes a complex portrait of San Francisco's Chinese-American community. The film was shot in three weeks for around $30,000 and incorporates many non-professional actors from the Chinatown community as well as local actors who are given room to improvise in scenes sometimes reminiscent of Cassavetes. The film won numerous awards upon its release and has since been deemed a National Treasure by the Library of Congress Film Registry.

Thursday, April 30, 5:30PM
Tuttleman Learning Center - Room 101
13th between Montgomery and Berks

Both films will be presented on DVD projected onto a big screen.

Temple University Cinematheque's Gorehound Contingent
presents

The Beyond
dir. Lucio Fulci, 1981, 87 mins, color

A woman inherits and unwisely decides to renovate a Louisiana hotel that may or may not be built on the site of one of the seven gates of Hell! A splatter masterpiece!

Michael Grant, formerly Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at The University of Kent, writes in Films Studies Winter 2004 that The Beyond exhibits "an order of self-interrogation" similar to the post-symbolist strand of literary modernism. "What this kind of experience gives onto is the true horror, the horror of the uncanny and the fantastic. It is the return of being in negation, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. It appears to us in the obsessions and insomnias of the night, and it is the fear of being, not fear for being, the fear of death. It is the experience of living death. ... Seen in this light, the film is nothing other than a catalog of notations of its own aesthetic... The degradation of the world represented in Fulci’s film is in effect a degradation marking the reversal by which reality is removed, and replaced by the shadow of the image. All darkens into the shadow of the beyond, and this peculiar death of the shadow serves in Fulci’s hands to undo the narrative from within, inverting it into what is at once an image of death and a dead image." Plus, a guy's face gets eaten off by spiders.

Hosted by Minister of Fear Michael Benedict

Thursday, April 23, 5:30PM
Tuttleman Learning Center - Room 101
13th between Montgomery and Berks
Free admission

This screening will be presented on DVD projected onto a big screen.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 9, 2009

Contact:
Jennifer McLennan
jennifer@arl.org

SPARKY VIDEO CONTEST GOES LOCAL, ADDS PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD
Competition showcases student videos, promotes library services
and offers instructors a fun and thought-provoking class assignment

Washington, DC - April 9, 2009 - The organizers of the popular Sparky Awards, which recognize the best new short videos on the value of information sharing, are calling on colleges and universities to organize their own campus video competitions in 2009 to get maximum benefit from the third-annual installment of the contest.

Well-suited for adoption as a class assignment, the Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. The contest is an opportunity to promote library services, including media services or the information commons, where students can edit video, browse media, work collaboratively and learn about copyright.

Last year Brigham Young University (BYU), Penn State University, and Dartmouth College were among the campuses that organized local Sparky contests. "The experience was remarkable," said BYU librarian Randy Olsen. "Although our contest was open for less than a month, we received seven submissions prepared by 58 students. The night we screened the entries I invited the video producers to introduce their works. In every case the students spoke articulately, even passionately, about open access and it was obvious that they had become conversant with all of the issues we as librarians care so much about. By the end of the evening I felt that our investment in the awards - an iTouch and two fifty dollar checks - was money well spent."

Entries in the international Sparky Awards competition must be received between April 9 and December 6, 2009. To be eligible, videos must be freely available on the Internet and available for use under a Creative Commons License.

In addition to the international Grand Prize and Runner-up winners selected by a distinguished jury, the organizers are adding a People's Choice Award this year, which will give visitors to the Sparky Web site a chance to vote for their favorite entry in the international competition. People's Choice voting will be open between December 8, 2009 and January 30, 2010, after all entries have been received.

The international award-winning videos will be announced in conjunction with the January 2010 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Boston, where the winners will be screened. The national Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. The Runner Up and People's Choice winners will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated.

For details on the contest and tips on organizing a local competition, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

# # #

THE SPARKY AWARDS are organized and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an alliance of academic libraries and research institutions that promotes new scholarly communication models that expand sharing of information via the Internet. SPARC is a founder of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.

The panel unanimously agreed Romanelli was at fault for failing to properly identify himself or to comply with the instructions or directions of a person acting in duly authorized university capacity and gave him disciplinary probation until the end of the Fall 2009 semester and 20 hours of community service, which they recommended he complete with Campus Safety.

I wish this Temple News article had gone into more detail about what photographers on campus are expected to do to comply with University regulations, and any discussion about how that may or may not differ from what regular citizen photographers can or cannot do with city or state police and photography. I bet there was some interesting followup discussion in that Photography for Filmmakers class.

Friday, April 17, 5:30PM
Annenberg Hall - Room 3
2020 N 13th St

Temple University Cinematheque presents
Stories for Your Eyes: An Evening of Rare 16MM Short Films
From the private collection of Leonard Guercio

A Parable of Two
dir. Satyajit Ray, 1964, b&w, 12 mins
Presented as a parable, this short film tells the story of two young Indian boys - a poor boy from the slums and a rich boy who lives in a beautiful house. The film addresses the continuing conflict between the haves and have-nots, technology and nature, friendly competition and mean-spiritedness through Ray's humanist lens.

A Boring Afternoon
dir. Ivan Passer, 1964, b&w, 16 mins
Part of the Czech New Wave omnibus Intimate Lighting, this film is Ivan Passer's directorial debut and tells a comic melancholy tale of laidback life in a small Czech village. Winner of the Grand Prix at teh 1966 Locarno International Film Festival.

Heureaux Anniversaire
dir. Pierre Etaix, 1962, b&w, 15 mins
Stylistically compared to both Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, Etaix evokes Keaton's melancholy deadpan as a harried husband trying to get home to his wife for their anniversary dinner. Winner of Best Live Action Short Subject at the 1963 Oscars.

AMCtv.com is providing access to B-movies on their website. Check out unsung masterworks of silliness such as Invasion of the Neptune Men.

Thursday, April 16, 4:00 & 6:00PM Paley Library - Lecture Hall, 1210 W Berks St Free admission!

The Secret Cinema and The Urban Archives present
Films from the Urban Archives: Secrets from Philadelphia's Past

This event will be the first ever public screening of films held in the Urban Archives collection, comprised of the former news and public affairs film libraries of two Philadelphia television stations. The Television Audiovisual Collections of the Urban Archives consists of approximately 14,000 cans of 16mm film from WPVI (formerly WFIL) and KYW. They include both aired and unused news footage, original documentaries and other special programming. The footage dates back to 1947 (when WFIL-TV first went on the air) and continues through the early 1980s. There will be two different blocks of film, each lasting approximately 90 minutes.

For more info: http://www.thesecretcinema.com

Ganja and Hess
dir. Bill Gunn, 1973, 110 min, color

Despite receiving a standing ovation during Critic's Week at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Ganja and Hess was drastically re-edited by producers when they realized they weren't getting the blaxploitation horror flick they expected. Lost for years, it was recently restored to the director's original unique vision. Join us for a screening of this fantastic film!

In Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), Manthia Diawara writes: "Ganja and Hess is perhaps the most beautifully shot Black film and the most daring with respect to pushing different passions to their limits... Bill Gunn defines a Black aesthetic that puts in the same space African spirituality, European vampire stories, the Black church, addiction to drugs, and liberated feminist desires."

Film scholar James Monaco, in his book American Film Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), describes it as "the great underground classic of Black film, and... the most complicated, intriguing, subtle sophisticated, and passionate Black film of the seventies. If Sweet Sweetback is Native Son, Ganja and Hess is Invisible Man."

Thursday, April 9, 5:30PM
Tuttleman Learning Center - Room 101
13th between Montgomery & Berks
Presented on DVD projected onto a big screen.