Thursday night, the Cinematheque Cinema Scholars Club screened The Five Obstructions, an experimental Dutch film as part of a weekly film event collaboration between the Departments of Cinema Studies and Romance Languages.
In a time when a movie ticket is upwards of $11 and even a Netflix subscription costs $8 a month, free film screenings are a great way to enjoy a high-quality film in a community-based setting similar to a theater.
At a large university, students often forget to take advantage of the many free events put on every week. Cinematheque is open and free to all students, faculty and community members. Bring a snack and a bud, sit back and enjoy. Your parents will be proud of how cultured college has made you.
Rebecca Rosenberg, a junior Italian major, attended the screening for the first time on Thursday night.
“I’m excited to be exposed to different areas of cinema you wouldn’t normally be exposed to,” Rosenberg said.
Professor Sergio Rigoletto, who teaches in the Department of Romance Languages, teamed up with a team of graduate students in his department, as well as in the Comparative Literature department last year to create the first term of Cinematheque screenings. Part of the Cinema Studies requirements for creating a weekly film screening is that the organizers create a format and must also ensure that the films selected are both diverse and mainly international.
“We’re doing this because we love cinema, and we also want to show films that matter, and also to make academic life more interesting,” Rigoletto said. “Many people collaborate and we try to show films you wouldn’t watch otherwise.”
Each term focuses on a different theme. This term’s theme is “playing and games.” Thursday’s screening showed a film that experimented with breaking the rules of the entire filmmaking process.
Ivano Fulgaro, a graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages volunteered for the screenings last year after taking one of Rigoletto’s Italian film classes.
“We try to watch movies that are not average. Movies that you need to look through a critical eye with,” Fulgaro said.
Next week’s film is Le grand jeu, a romantic French poetic realism film from 1934. The May 15 screening will be the Italian crime drama, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, followed by the Japanese crime film Pale Flower on May 22.The year’s last screening on May 29 will be Sonatine — a famous 1993 Japanese film.
Cinematheque screenings are held in Fenton 110 at 7:15 p.m. every Thursday during spring term.