Yale's Whitney Humanities Center Launches Movie Series

The decades-old Yale tradition of showing 35mm films on the big screen will continue this year as The Cinema at the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall St., kicks off its first season on September 2.

The decades-old Yale tradition of showing 35mm films on the big screen will continue this year as The Cinema at the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall St., kicks off its first season on September 2.

A student organization made up of undergraduates and graduate students from various schools and departments, The Cinema at Whitney will work with WHC to create a university-wide forum for the appreciation and discussion of film, both as art and as entertainment. In the tradition of repertory theater, The Cinema will offer films ranging from the experimental to the classic to the popular.

To inaugurate The Cinema, an opening gala will be held on September 2 featuring a screening of Federico Fellini’s classic film, “8½.” The screening at 8:30 p.m. will be preceded, at 8 p.m., by opening remarks from María Rosa Menocal, director of the Whitney Humanities Center.

The following week, The Cinema will begin its regular schedule for the academic year, showing two feature-length films each Friday, at 7:30 and 10 p.m., that are free and open to the public. These weekly screenings will be selected as “double features” with a mind to a specific theme or themes that speak broadly to the human condition. On October 14, The Cinema will present “Water Music(als): The Hole” (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998) and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (dir. Jacques Demy, 1964), a pair of musicals connected visually by the motif of torrential rain—and, by implication, the ineluctable forces of nature and fate that drive humanity. On Halloween weekend, The Cinema will show “Don’t Look Now” (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1978), a duo linked not only by their time period and exploitation of the macabre, but also by the screen presence of Donald Sutherland.

In addition to weekly screenings, The Cinema will take part in other events sponsored by WHC. On September 23 The Cinema will show “Don Quixote” (dir. Grigori Kozintsev, 1953) and “Lost in La Mancha” (dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002) as part of the Don Quixote at Four Hundred conference. And on October 22–23, The Cinema will present Food! A Film Festival, a series of food-related films designed to complement Ruth Reichl’s 2005 Tanner Lectures, “Why Food Matters.”

For more information about The Cinema at the Whitney, please contact miye.bromberg@yale.edu

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Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345