THE DRAMA OF GOOD & EVIL IN THE CINEMA
One of the most dramatic things in the world is the relation of good and evil. It’s a subject the cinema has been mightily interested in. And where good & evil are given beautiful form in film, we feel it’s a world that makes sense, a world that can be honestly liked.
Wed., July 10, 2013 • 6 PM
Films: The Exorcist; M; Strike; Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; To Kill a Mockingbird; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Witness; Rififi; The Night of the Hunter; Jean de Florette; The Grapes of Wrath.
This series shows how the art of the cinema, in its technique and meaning, and in all its diversity—from slapstick to spectacle, cinema verité to the fantastic, tragedy to comedy—is a oneness of the permanent opposites in reality:
“All beauty,” stated Eli Siegel, “is a making one of opposites,
and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Whenever a film is good or beautiful it is because it puts opposites together—rest and motion, light and dark, space and time, nearness and distance, continuity and discontinuity, unity and variety, freedom and order—the same opposites we are trying to make sense of in our lives. The series will study how these opposites are present in the motion picture, from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903 to the latest cinematic achievement. Short film excerpts will be shown and discussed in each class.
This class is on Wednesday July 10, 2013 • 6 – 8 PM
Audit: $12 (Contact Registrar 212.777.4490)
To see flyer for the series, click here.