Entries associated with the tag "Samuel Fuller":

Doc Films, the University of Chicago's venerable film society, kicks off its winter 2008 schedule tonight at 7 with Samuel Fuller's incomparable Pickup on South Street (1953), the first in a Monday-night series on the Hollywood maverick. Tuesday nights will be split between Jacques Demy and Jacques Tati, beginning tomorrow with Lola (1961). Wednesdays belong to Pedro Almodovar, whose All About My Mother (1999) will be screened this week. Doc offers two movies on Thursday nights; this term the early shows will focus on film noir (starting with Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place), the late shows on classic sexploitation (Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls).

The most tantalizing series may be the Sunday-night retrospective of silent films by Ernst Lubitsch, with live piano accompaniment by Daniel Sefik. It begins with Lady Windermere's Fan (1/13) and continues with such titles as The Oyster Princess (1/20), Madame DuBarry (2/3), One Arabian Night (2/10), Rosita (2/17), The Marriage Circle (2/24), and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (3/9).

Mark your calendars for two special events: On Monday, February 25, the symposium "Rediscovering American Cinema" will feature U. of C. professor Tom Gunning, New York Times DVD columnist (and Reader/Doc Films alum) Dave Kehr, and Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress as well as a screening of Cecil B. De Mille's The Golden Bed (1925). Beginning Friday, February 8, Doc and the Japan Foundation Midwest will present a free weekend series of five recent dramas that focus on "the changing scenery of Japan."

Now who can give me a lift to Hyde Park?

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the University of Chicago's Documentary Film Group (that's Doc Films to you) will be displaying some of its coolest possessions from July 16 to August 31 at the Joseph Regenstein Library, 1110 E. 57th. Along with old programs, posters, and programming calendars, you'll find correspondence from Samuel Fuller and Jean Renoir, rare personal-appearance photos of John Ford and Howard Hawks—even Fritz Lang's martini recipe.

Curator Kyle Westphal just completed a bachelor's degree in Cinema and Media Studies at UC, and his thesis documents the history of America's "longest continuously running student film society." About half the items were culled from alumni association materials donated to the library's special collections; Westphal, Doc's current programming chair, dug the rest of the stuff out of the group's archives. Among the artifacts on display:

•  A cartoon by Fritz Lang, drawn in 1970 for a Doc staffer living in Los Angeles. Lang had recently visited the Hyde Park campus for a screening of Hangmen Also Die (1943); mostly blind by then, he had to be led around on both arms, but according to Westphal he insisted on attending the screening and shouted from the back of the theater that the print was out of focus.

•  Silk-screened posters for Psycho and To Catch a Thief, autographed by Alfred Hitchcock during his 1967 visit, as well as excerpts from an unpublished interview.

•  Letters from Jean Renoir in 1969 and Sam Fuller in 1970 regarding their campus appearances.

•  Correspondence from Pauline Kael, Josef von Sternberg, and Stanley Kubrick, collected during the 1962-64 run of the Midwest Film Festival (a precursor to the Chicago International Film Festival).

•  Photos of John Ford (sample above), taken during a 1968 visit to screen The Long Voyage Home, and of Howard Hawks in 1971.

•  Publicity materials for Maya Deren's 1951 lecture at the university.

In addition to these items, says Westphal, the group's calendars also allowed him to track programming trends and critical ideas that influenced Doc's offerings to students over the years. "Doc Films at 75" is free and open to the public weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4:45 PM and Saturday from 9 AM to 12:45 PM. Westphal will give a guided tour of the exhibit during the opening reception on Monday, July 16, 3 to 4:30 PM. For more information contact the university's Special Collections Research Center at 773-702-8705 or specialcollections@lib.uchicago.edu.