In order to finish up about the Cinematheque, I think I'll list every retrospective we saw in the order that we saw them, and I will list one film you should see by each director. I know that I have previously listed a few of these movies when I started (but neglected to finish) a recommendation list a couple of months ago, so you might see some movies I already mentioned, but anyway, here goes :
The Retrospectives Of The Thursday Night Cinematheque at CSUN, from 2009 to 2018, listed by director and semester, followed by a recommended film.
1. Jean-Luc Godard, Fall 2009. "Band Of Outsiders" (aka "Bande a' part").
2. Federico Fellini, Spring 2010. "Nights Of Cabiria".
3. Ingmar Bergman, Fall 2010. "Through A Glass Darkly".
4. Luis Bunuel, Spring 2011. "The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie".
5. Akira Kurosawa, Fall 2011. "Ikiru".
6. Michaelangelo Antonioni, Spring 2012. "L'Avventura".
7. Francois Truffaut, Fall 2012. "Two English Girls"
8. Krzysztof Kieslowski, Spring 2013. "Red".
9. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fall 2013. "Love Is Colder Than Death".
10. Satyajit Ray, Spring 2014. "The Music Room".
11. Powell & Pressburger (film making team), Fall 2014. "A Canterbury Tale".
12. Yasujiro Ozu, Spring 2015. "Late Spring".
13. Orson Wells, Fall 2015. "Othello".
14. Andrei Tarkovsky, Spring 2016. "Stalker".
15. Robert Bresson, Fall 2016. "Diary Of A Country Priest".
16. John Cassavetes, Spring 2017. "Faces".
17. Buster Keaton, Fall 2017. "The General".
18. Andrzej Wajda, Spring 2018. "The Birch Wood".
So there you have it - all eighteen directors we covered during our nine year run. We saw 14 to 15 works by each one (and in Keaton's case about 20, because his films were shorter and we had several double features). I have given you just one recommendation by each, and in many cases (but not all), the film I recommend was also my favorite film of the ones we saw. In the case of "Diary Of A Country Priest" by Robert Bresson, that film is certainly in my all-time Top Ten, and probably in my Top Three.
With each filmmaker I could have listed many other favorites, but - in the hope that you will seek out at least some of them - I figured it was better to just mention one apiece, for each director. I think that world cinema may not be everyone's cup of tea........at least initially. But if you give these movies a try, you will be exposing yourself to many of the great masters of cinema ("cinema" meaning movie making as an art form), and I am betting that if you give even just a few of them a try, you will become hooked just as I was.
If I had to pick my favorite retrospectives of the entire nine year series, I guess I would say, in no particular order :
Robert Bresson
Yasujiro Ozu
Buster Keaton
Orson Welles
Andrzej Wajda
Satyajit Ray
Powell & Pressburger
I loved them all, of course, but I think with these filmmakers I saw a lot of movies I had not been exposed to before (except for Bresson, who is my #1 director of all time), and the variety of styles and artistic extrapolations from these particular directors was astonishing.
So that was my experience at the CSUN Cinematheque. It lasted for nine years, but it felt much quicker as it went by. There is something about the isolation from real life that a movie provides that makes a sequential movie experience like the nine year, 270 movie Cinematheque run feel like it occurred in a vacuum. The movies we saw, regularly scheduled in the Armer Theater every Thursday except in Summer, feel separated from the time factor of life, and so the nine years feels like........
I dunno. I could say "nine months", or some such comparison, and you would know what I mean. But what it really felt like - what it feels like now that it's gone, and overwith - it feels like it took place in a void, an opening in time where we were free to escape real life and immerse ourselves in truly great art, for two or three hours each week, on Thursday Nights.
Art is what you make it. It's what you create, it's what you appreciate, it's what you revere, it's what you make time for - what you reserve time for in the busy nonsense of regular living.
Make time for art.
Long Live The Cinematheque.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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