4x4 Film Forums

October 28
The Wall
Hosted by Professor Dave Lefkowitz
In this film forum, David Lefkowitz, Assistant Chair of Audio Production, will discuss the idea of the concept album and discuss how musical lyrics and sound production can play a role in film production, delivering a storyline as well as captivating a mood to an audience even before a video track is created.

Pink Floyd¹s The Wall (1982) was filmed in a way that utilized musical lyrics to tell a story rather than using traditional narration or dialogue. Discussion will be based on the effectiveness of this movie-making style as well as how music can be associative in nature, creating powerful imagery that can be produced into a film.

Which comes first, the video or the audio? .

November 25
Hannah and Her Sisters
Hosted by Professor David Reeder
Hannah and Her Sisters is the 1986 comedy film by Woody Allen that tells the tangled stories of three sisters Hannah (Mia Farrow), Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey) during the two years that begin and end with Thanksgiving dinner. The movie was written and directed by Woody Allen who appears as Farrow's hypochondriac television producer ex-husband Mickey. The film's superb supporting cast includes Michael Caine as Hannah's philandering second husband Elliot, as well as Maureen O'Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan (as Hannah's parents), Max von Sydow, Julie Kavner, Daniel Stern, Lewis Black, Joanna Gleason, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sam Waterston and many others.

Although this film was nominated for seven Academy awards, [Best Picture. Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Caine, winner) & Best Supporting Actress (Wiest, winner), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Best Film Editing] it is the significant achievement of the collaboration between Woody Allen and Cinematographer Carlo DiPalma (Il Deserto Rosso, Blowup) that is the focus here. The films impact is due to the evolution of the mis-en-scene or master-scene method used by Allen (and long-time collaborator Gordon Willis) with DiPalma's addition of a fluid, moving camera. The contributions of camera crew and Production Designer Stuart Wurtzel will also be covered.

December 9
Chinatown
Hosted by Professor Barry Zaltman
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, is a 1974 film noir detective story set in Los Angeles during the early forties. Polanski masterfully quotes the noir genre and in an unexpected double take casts John Huston, Director of the noir classic, The Maltese Falcon, as the heavy in Chinatown.

Interpretively, the film is rich and mutilayered. It is engaging as a mystery, but more profoundly, it invites a comparison to Sophocles¹ play, Oedipus the King. Polanski appropriates several parallel themes from that Greek tragedy to drive the action on a palpable and gripping subconscious level. And, as in Dionysian Theater, the ending is horrigying, while being psychologically inevitable.