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Bard College Film Schedule (Fall 1964)

From the Bard Observer (September 9, 1964). I ran the Friday night film series during most of my time at Bard College, and in many cases, I was booking these films in order to see them for the first time (although, as I recall, not in the cases of North by Northwest, Zazie, Jules and Jim, This Sporting Life, Freaks, or The Phenix City Story). –- J.R.

Sept. 18 TROUBLE IN PARADISE. Continental comedy borne up out of the early thirties, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. Mlle. Falconetti suffers in public and in silence. Directed by Carl Dreyer in 1928.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________         Sept. 25 SAWDUST AND TINSEL Also known as “The Naked Night”. The only Ingmar Bergman film Bard can afford (also one of the best). A circus setting; made in 1953.

Also: “Jammin’ the Blues,” 10 minutes of Lester Young, Harry Edison, Jo Jones and others.

Oct. 2 FREAKS/THE PHENIX CITY STORY A double feature devoted to le film maudit: 2 unconventional American “B” pictures—the first an unclassifiable and unsettling 60-minute story of sideshow life, the second a sensational “exposé” of corrupt Alabama politics, filmed on location.

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Oct. 9 NORTH BY NORTHWEST Alfred Hitchcock’s most exhaustive and authoritative movie, encompassing everything from the U.N. Building to Mount Rushmore. In color, with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.

also: “Gorilla My Dreams,” a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

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Oct. 16 ZAZIE An hour and a half of anarchistic, occasionally frightening slapstick, all shot in beautiful color. Directed by Louis Malle in 1960; based on the novel by Raymond Queneau; in French.

GREED Zolaesque realism and Zasu Pitts. Directed by Eric von Stroheim in 1923; based on Frank Norris’s McTeague. One of the great silent pictures.

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Oct. 23 RICHARD III Lawrence Olivier’s production of Shakespeare’s play. With Olivier, Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Ralph Richardson and others; in color.

Oct. 30 IVAN THE TERRIBLE PARTS I & II The last two films of Sergei Eisenstein, both made in the mid-forties; musical score by Prokofiev; in black and white and color.

Nov. 6 THIS SPORTING LIFE Lindsay Anderson’s uneven but powerful story about a rugby player, made last year in England; with Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts.

also: “Pow Wow,” concerning a rehearsal of a college band in the rain.

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Nov. 13 HORSE FEATHERS The Marx Brothers. Groucho figures as the president of an all-American college and Harpo drops large blocks of ice from a second story window. 1932.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS   Orson Welles’s second film (made shortly after Citizen Kane), based in Booth Tarkington’s novel; with Anne Baxter, Joseph Cotton, and Agnes Moorehead. 1942.

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Nov. 20   VARIETY An hour of Emil Jannings and dizzying camera tricks, with a reputedly sordid story. A silent German film, directed by E. A. Dupont in 1925.

JULES AND JIM François Truffaut’s rapturous ode to practically everything, with Jeanne Moreau. Possibly the best film yet to have come out of the New Wave.

Dec. 4 IKIRU Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated story of contemporary Japan, made in 1952.

also: “All This and Rabbit Stew,” a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________          Dec. 11 LE MILLION René Clair’s classic French comedy. One of the early sound pictures, made in 1930.

SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS A somewhat bittersweet comedy about Hollywood, directed by Preston Sturges in 1943.

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Since the budgets for this semester have not yet been granted this list is subject to some changes. Many of the films that have been requested — EAST OF EDEN, SHADOWS, and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for example — have been omitted because they are no longer available. Suggestions are welcome.

JON ROSENBAUM
Bard Film Club

What We Ate in That Year (1964 review of A MOVEABLE FEAST)

From the Bard Observer, September 9, 1964. -– J.R.

What We Ate in That Year

A MOVEABLE FEAST, by Ernest Hemingway, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 211 pp., $4.95.

In the spring of that year, long after he was dead, a book of his was published and it was a good book. He had not written a good book for quite some time and the critics were beginning to worry. They had wanted to say something good about him now that he was dead, but there were no good books to say good things about except for those written twenty and thirty years ago, and they (the critics) had already spoken enough about the earlier ones anyway.

The new book was about Paris of long ago when he and his friends were writing the earlier books. In those days there was Miss Stein and Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis and Ford Maddox Ford and several others. Some were good and some were very good and others were not so good at all. He was not like the others because he was not a homosexual or an alcoholic and he did not have bad breath or look evil. Much of the time he would write, and during the times that he would not write he would walk the shaded avenues or go to the races. There was always the races, and when there wasn’t the races, there was always skiing in the alps or reading the Russian novelists.

He said at the beginning of the book that it could be regarded as a work of fiction but that even as that it might shed some light on what has been published as fact. This was a good thing to say because it let him off at either end. But there is one part about Scott Fitzgerald that might or might not have been really true but was really good in the way that a very good short story was good. And maybe it was true anyway. But what mattered was not that it was either true or not true but that it was good, and all of them were dead anyway, all of them except for Ezra. So one could say that it was a good book to have been written. -– J.R.