Cornell Cinema lets area filmgoers find movie connections

By Linda Myers

The lights dim, the theater turns silent, and there's the craggy grin of Jean Paul Belmondo, cigarette dangling from his lips, murmuring "Bogey" and nodding in homage to a photo of Humphrey Bogart in a Parisian shop window. Around the corner Jean Seberg in her boy haircut, tight T-shirt and capri pants, is hawking New York Herald Tribunes.

Cornell Cinema staff members, from left, Managing Director C.A. Carlson; Director Mary Fessenden; and Julia Perini, administrative assistant, test the seats in the comfortable Willard Straight Theatre. Matthew Fondeur/University Photography

Cornell Cinema is screening Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" during orientation week this August as part of its Masters of World Cinema, and a fresh contingent of Cornell students sink into their seats along with the regular crowd, primed to put aside their adjustment problems for two hours and lose themselves in the pleasures of advanced movie-going.

What does a film made 40 years ago by a French master of mise-en-scène have to offer people who stood in line this summer to watch George Clooney in "The Perfect Storm"? More than you might imagine.

"I hear he influenced Tarantino," says one young filmgoer, and the conversation segues into a discussion about favorite Tarantino films, then favorite "indie" films.

Mike Rubin of the Village Voice called Cornell Cinema one of the two best campus film programs in the country (University of Chicago's was the other) and faculty members who rely on it as a supplementary teaching tool, such as Mary Woods (history of architecture), Debra Fried (English), Larry Moore (history and American studies) and Don Fredericksen (film studies), say they consider it a community treasure.

"I don't think even the universities with the famous filmmakers, NYU, UCLA, have anything that comes close to Cornell Cinema," says Fredericksen.

Mary Fessenden, director of Cornell Cinema, has been running the program for the past five years after working with former director Richard Herskowitz for eight years and earning a master's degree in arts administration from Binghamton University.

She describes Cornell Cinema's primary mission as educational -- "to expose Central New York audiences to alternative forms of cinema and alternative voices not usually heard through the mass media." But it has a secondary mission too, "to offer affordable, second-run commercial film entertainment for the Cornell community," she says. Hence, "Gladiator" will play back-to-back this weekend with "Le Samouri," a 1960s French noir classic.

To make it all happen, Fessenden attends key film festivals like the one in Toronto this month, meeting with other film program directors from around the country, viewing 30 films in under a week and deciding which titles to bring back to Cornell.

"There's not another cinema in Ithaca or anywhere else I've lived with such a broad range of films, from classics to the obscure to blockbuster," says Yutan Getzler, a graduate student in chemistry and chemical biology. "I boast about Cornell Cinema to my friends living in other places."

This fall new student filmgoers are being given "passports," special navy blue folders with the photos and filmography of stars like Catherine Deneuve and filmmakers like Godard in an effort to introduce them to the pleasures of world cinema. The passports will be stamped with a "visa" each time they attend a foreign film; after they rack up four, their fifth is free. Passports are free, too, and available at the box offices of Cornell Cinema's two theaters, in Willard Straight Hall and Uris Hall.

To its regulars, Cornell Cinema is famous for its huge one-sheet monthly film calendar. Graphically innovative but sometimes challenging to decipher, the calendar offers choice tidbits about each of its movies, for example, guest filmmaker David Geller '82, will be speaking this Saturday, Sept. 23, at the 7:15 p.m. screening of his "Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors." The documentary revisits the 10 Stanford graduates whom he filmed as first-year students in his 1993 "Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm."

Now entering its 30th year, Cornell Cinema sometimes has to struggle to make ends meet, says Fessenden. Students are often surprised to learn it's an enterprise unit, which means although it's nonprofit, it must pay for all its operating expenses: fees for renting and shipping films and for renting theater space from Cornell, fees and expenses of visiting filmmakers, staff and student salaries, even the rent on its tiny warren of offices in the lowest level of Willard Straight Hall.

At $4 a ticket for most showings, ticket sales cover only 50 percent of Cornell Cinema's operating expenses nowadays, down from 90 percent in the era before video rentals, multiplex movie theaters and DVDs lured away moviegoers. Another 25 percent comes from the Student Assembly through the student activities fee (about $7 a student goes to Cornell Cinema). The rest of the budget comes from a grant from the electronic media and film program of the New York State Council on the Arts, co-sponsorship contributions from academic departments, fund-raising efforts, rental fees from the video library and a slim subsidy from the university.

Even on a shoestring, Cornell Cinema manages to pull together a tantalizingly varied lineup, says Fredericksen, a fan. This fall there are more than a dozen film series, among them one highlighting black filmmakers, shown in conjunction with the Johnson Museum's Blackness in Color exhibition; and one on sex and immorality in pre-code Hollywood films, highlighted by a visit and talk on that topic by film scholar Thomas Doherty. Also on tap are new prints of classic Alfred Hitchcock films and one-time showings of three rare silent films with live musical accompaniment: a restored 1919 documentary about Ernest Shackleton's perilous Antarctic voyage; the racy 1929 film "Erotikon: Or One Woman's Perfume"; and the 1924 film classic "Peter Pan," in Cornell Cinema's IthaKid series.

C.A. Carlson, managing director of Cornell Cinema, says she's looking forward to both the Icelandic and Korean film series this semester. "It's a terrific medium for learning what different cultures have to say about themselves," she says. Carlson began working for Cornell Cinema as an undergraduate and joined its permanent staff in 1996 following graduate studies.

Cornell Cinema employs about 40 students each semester. They work as "box officers," house managers, projectionists, graphic designers, publicity assistants, writers and shippers, and they are, by in large, a cheerful, cohesive group. "It's a neat group of people who like films," says Jeff Pash, a senior in arts and sciences from Newport Beach, Calif., who has been working there since his sophomore year. The job has the added attraction of a season movie pass.

"I would have given anything to have a place like Cornell Cinema when I was an undergraduate," says Fessenden. "I often tell students and Ithacans that they'll never live anywhere else where they'll be able to view such a fabulous array of films under one roof for so little money and in such a beautiful theater."

All Cornell Cinema films are listed on this web site: http://cinema.cornell.edu.