Arts & Lectures
2001-2002 Season Film Series News Release
For Immediate Release

December 18, 2001
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu

UCSB Arts & Lectures Winter Cinema 2002 Series
features 12 entertaining, thought provoking film

Summary Facts:

UCSB Arts & Lectures Winter Cinema 2002 Series features eight Santa Barbara area premieres and the work of acknowledged world auteurs, including Jean-Luc Godard, Gillo Pontecorvo and Zhang Yimou. Four special events also highlight this schedule. On January 23 Arts & Lectures teams with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival to present the devastating look inside Afghanistan, Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin. On January 24 Arts & Lectures Cinema partners with Sings Like Hell, co-presenting Down from the Mountain, the concert film grown out of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack phenomenon. On March 8 Arts & Lectures will screen the highly acclaimed documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, a return to the subject of the wildly popular summer 2000 screening at UCSB of South, the 1919 silent documentary about the same harrowing event. On March 12 pianist/composer Michael Mortilla will accompany a silent film screening of G.W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl featuring the legendary Louise Brooks.

The series begins on Thursday, January 10 with Mulholland Drive, hailed by critics as director David Lynch’s best film since Blue Velvet. The film began as a pilot for ABC television, explaining some of its here-and-then-gone characters, but TV execs shied away from the odd dream world Lynch has put together. The plot begins with an amnesiac brunette who dubs herself Rita and a perky blonde eager to be an actress, and where it ends is hard to tell even after watching the film. Still critics rave about this heady trip; Rolling Stone, for instance, claims, “For visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore’s lip gloss, there’s nothing like this baby anywhere.” (2001, 146 minutes)

On Sunday, January 13, Santa Barbara sees the premiere of a film made over 40 years ago. Director Gillo Pontecorvo is probably best known for his political fireball The Battle of Algiers (1965), but his debut The Wide Blue Road is stylistically perched between Italian Neorealism and the art cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni. Yves Montand commands the screen as an Italian fisherman struggling to survive in this starkly beautiful morality tale. Director Jonathan Demme calls the film, “Enormously gripping and entertaining.” In Italian with English subtitles. (1957, 99 minutes)

The series dramatically shifts gears with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a self-proclaimed “post-punk neo-glam rock musical,” which screens on Thursday, January 17. The film version of John Cameron Mitchell’s off-Broadway smash follows Hedwig—victim of a botched sex change operation, the deprivations of an East Berlin childhood and a broken heart—as she performs her Bowie-esque songs during a national tour of a seafood restaurant chain. With charming animation by Emily Hubley, sister of Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo. (2001, 95 minutes)

UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival present Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin, a remarkable documentary about Afghanistan, on Wednesday, January 23. The film chronicles a land torn by war for 20 years prior to the fall 2001 U.S. bombing. A surgeon and a war correspondent team up to build a hospital that is quickly overrun by the wounded and dying from the civil war (or jung) that rages between the oppressive Taliban and the Northern Alliance mujaheddin. An Afghani woman who says, “Not even death wants the people of Afghanistan,” encapsulates this graphic, eye-opening journey into grief. The film is essential viewing for understanding this country. In Dari and Italian with English subtitles. (Fabrizio Lazzaretti, Alberto Vendemmiati, 2000, 114 minutes)

The series returns to a musical theme with Down from the Mountain, which screens Thursday, January 24. The runaway success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack led to a series of concerts featuring the stellar old time, country and bluegrass musicians on that album. This film captures a concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium with performances by the likes of Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Allison Krauss and the utterly engaging master of ceremonies John Hartford, who sadly passed away a few months after filming. Directed by the ace team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back), Nick Doob (The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (Startup.com). Co-presented with Sings Like Hell. (2001, 98 minutes)

Like The Circle before it, Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman examines what it means to be female in contemporary Iran through several vignettes. But unlike the nightmare urban world in The Circle, Meshkini’s film, which screens Sunday, February 10, presents a seemingly freer Iran, from the succor of the seaside to the consumer paradise of the shopping center. The mad whimsy of women racing bikes yet still dressed in chadors is just one of many memorable images. The New York Times attests to the film’s universality: “Childhood innocence, the passage of time, the authority and mystery of adults and how inescapable social forces bear down on our lives: all this and more are evoked with a deep, understated poignancy.” In Farsi with English subtitles. (2001, 78 minutes)

A beautifully restored print of Band of Outsiders, Jean-Luc Godard’s second variation (after Breathless) on American gangster films, screens on Tuesday, February 12. As much about youth lost in their love of American B-pictures as a pulp film itself, Band of Outsiders concerns the tale of two boys attempting to rob a villa owned by the aunt of the girl with whom both are infatuated. That girl is Anna Karina—Godard’s frequent star, eternal muse and at the time his wife. Worth seeing just for the film’s coolly ironic dance number that has been an inspiration for filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Hal Hartley. In French with English subtitles. (1964, 97 minutes)

On Thursday, February 14, the series presents a special romantic treat for Valentine’s Day, The Road Home, directed by Chinese master Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Not One Less). A film of classic, lyric simplicity, it tells a tale of undying love in a remote Chinese province. Zhang (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) Ziyi’s performance as the prettiest girl in the village fighting to escape an arranged marriage when she spies her true love, the new schoolteacher, is a heartrending study of obsessive passion. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (2000, 100 minutes)

On Tuesday, February 19 the opening night film from the 2001 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Life and Debt, will have two showings, at 7:30 pm & 9:30 pm. This documentary uses down-to-earth methods to explain the complex reasons why so many of the world’s developing countries remain caught in an economic quagmire that prevents them from becoming self-sufficient. It focuses on the plight of Jamaica, directly presenting the farmers and factory workers who suffer under the oppressive economics created by the International Money Fund and World Trade Organization. The film gains depth and emotion from Jamaica Kincaid’s narration (adapted from her book A Small Place) and from the swaying vibe of its reggae soundtrack. (Stephanie Black, 2000, 86 minutes)

The series moves from the sunny Caribbean to the frozen South Pole for The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition on Friday, March 8. Ernest Shackleton hoped to cross the Antarctic landmass, enlisting his hearty crew with an ad that began: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold...” Indeed, they sailed into a 22-month long ordeal. This documentary, based on Caroline Alexander’s book, uses numerous methods to bring the dire event to gripping life: photographer Frank Hurley’s on-the-expedition stills and film, actors reading from the adventurers’ diaries, film shot in Antarctica in the present day, interviews with the crew’s living relatives and even some judicious use of reenactments. Salon calls The Endurance “one of the most finely crafted films you’re likely to see this year or any other.” (George Butler, 2001, 93 minutes)

On Tuesday, March 12 Arts & Lectures continues its quarterly tradition of silent film presentations with German director G.W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, which will screen in a new 35 millimeter print. Following up on their success with Pandora’s Box, Pabst and his definitive 1920s starlet Louise Brooks (of the ever popular “bob” hairdo) teamed up for an even more daring tale of radical sexual freedom and corrupted innocence. The film was repeatedly edited by censors, but a recent restoration not only makes explicit the tangled contingencies of sex and capital but also liberates the film’s comic spirit. Composer/pianist Michael Mortilla, widely acclaimed for his scores for the Chaplin Mutual DVD release, returns to Campbell Hall to play live accompaniment to this silent classic. (1929, 110 minutes)

The series concludes with a showing of Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s latest film The Vertical Ray of the Sun on Thursday, March 14. Moving north to Hanoi from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, he examined in his previous films The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, Tran takes a Chekhovian look at three Vietnamese sisters coping with their parents’ deaths and the tenuous balance between daily life and unbridled passions. The gorgeous cinematography hints at the depths of emotion and beauty just under the placid surface of the routine. In Vietnamese with English subtitles. (2000, 112 minutes)

All film screenings (except as noted) begin at 7:30 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Tickets for all films are available in advance at the UCSB Arts & Lectures Ticket Office (893-3535) and may be purchased in person or charged by phone. Tickets can also be bought at the door, if available, starting at 6:30 pm. All tickets are $6 for the general public and $5 for UCSB students, except for the special film The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition on March 8. Tickets for that event are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students.

Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, these films are sponsored by The Santa Barbara Independent, KCSB Radio 91.9 FM, Blue Agave and The Daily Nexus. Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin and Life and Debt are presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, The UC Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the UCSB Global Peace and Security Program, and Global and International Studies as part of the lecture series Global Peace, Security and Human Rights. Additional support provided by the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies, Santa Barbara Committee on Foreign Relations, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, PAX 2100, International Students Association at SB City College, and the International Studies Program at Ventura College.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.

©2001 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara