Watch the Skies! Festival Program Soon to Land
We’re less than two weeks away from announcing our full festival program, but we’ve already leaked a few highlights in a press release.
Remember when our theme was WET, and we held screenings in the Aquatic Center pool? Well, for ALIENS!, we’re opening up a “microcinema” in the McCormick Observatory’s 40-seat lecture room (microcinemas are small “do it yourself” theaters, usually run by artists, featuring experimental and underground works). While films screen in the lecture room, the Dome Room telescope will be open to the public and combing the skies for Martians, seventy years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast (we’ll play that broadcast on its 70th anniverary, October 30).
Curators Ed Halter and Craig Baldwin (who run, respectively, the Light Industry and Other Cinema microcinemas on the East and West coasts) will be joined in the McCormick Microcinema by avant-garde filmmakers Jeanne Liotta and George and Mike Kuchar in presenting the spaciest films in our program. Halter has unearthed Chariot of the Gods, and will screen it along with clips from other Sunn International exposes on Bigfoot, UFO’s, and the Bermuda Triangle. The Kuchars have compiled three programs of their underground alien invasion epics. Liotta has collected classics by Joseph Cornell, James Whitney, Hollis Frampton alongside her own work, and Baldwin is mixing his own political found-footage mash-up Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America with titles by Bjorn Melhus, Bill Brown, and the Ford Motor Company.
Meanwhile, I have to thank all the people who responded to this blog and sent suggestions for our program. Several of you suggested The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the Keanu Klaatu version), and we’ll be teaming up with the new Library of Congress film archive in Culpeper to present it in their wonderful new theater. Close Encounters was also suggested, a much better choice than the overplayed E.T., and we’ll have it on the big screen in Culbreth Theatre. As for immigrant-themed works, somebody suggested Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and I managed to track down a print and it’s in the program. I loved Matt Marshall’s suggestion that we show Cat People, about a Serbian immigrant with a dark secret, made by two immigrants (Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur), and so that’s in, too.
On September 25, on this website, all will be revealed.
