Please Give to the Cinematheque Today!

November 29, 2016 - 8:49am
Posted by Jim Healy

Inferno in 3-D is coming to the Cinematheque in early 2017!

"Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody' else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just stuck being myself, day after day.

The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people."


Roger Ebert
        
As we approach the end of 2016, we hope you can reflect on how the UW Cinematheque has enriched your life this year.

This year, the Cinematheque has presented nearly 150 screenings and programs, all for free, in our regular venues at 4070 Vilas Hall, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Marquee Theater at Union South. Our selections have included series devoted to 1960s musicals, new restorations from UCLA, new cinema from Mexico, Italian restorations, French tough guy actors, one-shot directors, and heroines of anime. Plus, retrospectives that paid homage to acclaimed international directors like Wim Wenders, Ingmar Bergman, and Brian De Palma, as well as centennial celebrations for the great movie stars Kirk Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. We welcomed speakers and artists like writer/director Andrew Bergman, UW Professor and author David Bordwell, filmmakers Peter Flynn and Ted Nakamura, and Robert Ryan biographer J.R. Jones. We brought you the first and, in some cases, only area theatrical screenings of such acclaimed new movies as Hitchcock-Truffaut;Miguel Gomes' epic Arabian Nights; Chantal Akerman's final work, No Home Movie; Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader; Roberto Minervini's The Other Side; and coming up in December, Lewis Klahr's mesmerizing Sixty Six.

The equipment in our projection booth at the Cinematheque's main venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, allows us to maintain the highest standards of digital and 35mm film exhibition. Our venues remain a rarefied regular exhibitor of films shown in their beautiful, original 35mm format.

Our upcoming January-May calendar will begin with an exciting four-day series of programs in 3-D, presented with temporarily installed special equipment. Other early 2016 series will focus on Fox film restorations from the New York's Museum of Modern Art collection; the music of John Williams; and the avant-garde masterworks of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. You can also look forward to a healthy offering of new international cinema in our Premiere Showcase selections and other series!

Cinematheque screenings will continue to be free and open to the public, but we still rely on donations from our audiences to keep our technical facilities up-to-date. Please help us in providing the Cinematheque with the most exciting film programming in the region by clicking here and making a donation today to the Cinematheque's Friends of Film fund.

See you at the Cinematheque!

Jim Healy, Director of Programming