CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - "Representation" is the theme for the 2009-10 film series by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The fall series considers representation as it relates to governments and institutions - from the creation of images and ideologies to the distinction between the world and the ways of representing it.
The series will begin Thursday (Sept. 17) with a screening of "The Truman Show," the 1998 film by director Peter Weir. Starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman unaware that his life is a long-running TV show and that his friends and family are actors, "The Truman Show" poses a series of questions, with one big question at its center: What is real?
All films, free and open to the public, begin at 5:30 p.m. in Room 62 of Krannert Art Museum, 500 Peabody Drive, Champaign.
"The theme of representation is fundamental to film, which at its most basic level is a representation of worlds both real and imaginary," said Christine Catanzarite, senior associate director of the IPRH and the organizer of the film series. "This year's film series provides an opportunity to turn our attention to the many ways in which film and its various representations can function for us as audience members."
The lineup also includes:
- Oct. 15, "A Face in the Crowd," 1957, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau and Lee Remick. Griffith plays a coarse backwoods folk singer and petty crook discovered by an Arkansas radio producer eager for new talent. His low-key charm as a radio personality soon leads to a wider national audience on television, where his manufactured brand of charismatic rebellion makes him a national folk hero. Kazan's portrait of the seductive nature of fame and audience gullibility now seems ahead of its time.
- Oct. 29, "The Great Dictator," 1940, directed by Charles Chaplin, and starring Chaplin, Jackie Oakie and Paulette Goddard, is Chaplin's first "talkie," made during the early days of World War II. It pokes bitter fun at Hitler, fascism and anti-Semitism. Chaplin plays dual roles as Adenoid Hynkel, the vicious dictator of the fictional Tomania, and as his lookalike, a humble Jewish barber who lives in the Ghetto. A case of mistaken identity propels the barber into the spotlight and provides the opportunity for silent film star Chaplin to speak.
- Nov. 12, "Brazil," 1985, directed by Terry Gilliam, and starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Ian Holm, Michael Palin and Bob Hoskins, is the cult classic black comedy about a dystopian, Orwellian industrial world where the machines that control everything are prone to tragic mishaps. Sam Lowry, played by Pryce, is a menial office worker who gets tangled up in a bureaucratic nightmare but whose daydreams transport him to an idyllic world where he can soar above the system and envision a happy ending.
Immediately following the showing of "Brazil," there will be a gallery talk organized in conjunction with the Krannert Art Museum exhibition "Under Control."
The IPRH film series, inaugurated in 2000, is thematically linked with the IPRH topic for each year. The film series will continue in the spring semester and will address representation from a social and cultural perspective; titles for the spring series will be announced in January.
For more information, visit the IPRH Web site at www.iprh.illinois.edu or contact Catanzarite at catanzar@illinois.edu.
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