Tonight, Oct. 2, at 7 in the Willard Straight Hall Theatre, Cornell Cinema will present the Ithaca premiere of the omnibus film "September 11," with an introduction by Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell professor of English. Tickets are $6 general; $5 for students and seniors; and $4 for Cornell graduate students.
Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, French producer Alain Brigand asked 11 international directors to respond to the events by making a film lasting 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame. The resulting thought-provoking collection ranges from angry to mournful to confrontational. The piece includes work by a range of acclaimed directors, including Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Ken Loach (Great Britain), Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Mira Nair (India), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso) and Danis Tanovic (Bosnia). Additional screenings will take place Friday, Oct. 3, at 6:45 p.m. in Uris Auditorium and Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight.
Also in October, Cornell Cinema will present four related series of surrealist cinema in conjunction with the Johnson Museum's exhibit "Surrealist Drawings From the Drukier Collection" and co-sponsored with the museum. Master of Surrealism: Luis Buñuel includes six works from the director, whose original, sharply political, hilarious and horrifying films comprise one of the most extensive bodies of work in surrealist cinema. A program titled "Three Canonical Works: Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or & Las Hurdes" will take place Monday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, with an introduction by Associate Professor Don Fredericksen.
Additionally, Cornell Cinema will present Classic Surrealist Cinema, which covers early revolutions of film form in the 1920s and explores the ongoing influence of the 20th century's most popular -- though not most endearing -- art movement. Titles include "A Propos de Nice," Jean Vigo's surrealist documentary of street life on the Côte d'Azur; "Juliet of the Spirits," Fellini's dreamlike, hallucinatory first foray into color; and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," Terry Gilliam's gleeful send-up of hierarchy and stiff-upper-lip legend.
Concurrently, Contemporary Surreelists Around the World will showcase filmmakers who carry on the aesthetic traditions of the earlier Surrealist movement, but with newer technologies and techniques. This series features, among others, Raul Ruiz's "Three Lives and Only One Death," a comedy about four men inhabiting the body of one man, and Jan Svankmajer's "Little Otik," a psycho Pinocchio story about a childless couple who adopts a tree stump.
Finally, Cornell Cinema will present a program dedicated to two surrealist painters: a screening of the recent film "Frida," about the life of Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo, teamed up with the short "Homage to Magritte" (1975, 10 minutes) by Anita Thacher.
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