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| Vol. 19, No. 4 | Sept. 23, 1999 |
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| Vol. 19, No. 4 | Sept. 23, 1999 |
The University's 1999 International Film Series offers local film buffs the chance to view a wide variety of foreign movies, including three rare screenings of hard-to-find films-Comrades: Almost a Love Story, a newly restored print of The Housemaid and Drifting Clouds, courtesy of the Finnish Cultural Consulate.
All of the offerings in the free public screenings in this film series will be shown at 7:30 p.m., Sundays, in the theatre of the Trabant University Center. All foreign-language films are shown with subtitles.
The series opens on Sept. 26 with a screening of Dr. Akagi. Made in Japan in 1998, the film tells the story of a small-town physician in Japan near the end of World War II nicknamed "Dr. Liver," who obsessively pursues his quest to eradicate hepatitis. The film builds to what The Village Voice called "an ending of unsurpassed weirdness and apocalyptic poetry." Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the film for its "idiosyncratic blend of frank earthiness, harsh flippancy, bizarre kinks and flashes of unlikely formal beauty."
Saint Clara, produced in Israel in 1996, will be shown on Oct. 3. A young girl's psychic abilities are revealed when her entire class aces a math test, but her mother warns her that her powers will fail once she falls in love. The film swept the Israeli Academy Awards, winning best picture, director, actress and five other prizes. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle praised the film for its "elements of whimsy with a sarcastic, satirical edge."
Gabbeh, produced in France and Iran in 1996, will be shown Oct. 10. Known as the film that marked the arrival of Iranian cinema, the word Gabbeth refers to a richly colored carpet and the story told in its weaving of a father who repeatedly puts obstacles in the path of his daughter's wedding. "A visual wonder, folkloric and folk-lyrical," Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine.
Comrades: Almost a Love Story, scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 17, is a sweet, romantic tearjerker said to be perfect for those who "like movies where lovers say goodbye on rainy piers in the dead of night." Made by Peter Chan, the film gives actress Maggie Cheung one of her best roles and won best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography and actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
Hands on a Hardbody, made in the U.S. in 1997 and set in East Texas, will play on Sunday, Oct. 24. The hardbody is the grand prize in a contest: the last person to take his/her hands off a pickup truck gets to drive it home. Jay Carr of the Boston Globe called it "a surprisingly affecting metaphor for American life as an ongoing exercise in endurance."
The rare U.S. screening of The Housemaid on Oct. 31 will give audience members a chance to see what has been called the best film by Korea's most idiosyncratic filmmaker. The bizarre melodrama depicts the personal cost of Korea's rapid postwar modernization as a young housemaid tries to steal her employer away from his wife. Her schemes include poisoning, murder and suicide attempts.
The special U.S. screening of Drifting Clouds on Nov. 7 features director Aki Kaurismki's mix of despair and joy. A young couple struggled to find work after being downsized, tiptoeing through a world defined by corruption and exploitation.
The film series concludes on Nov. 14 with After Life, made in Japan in 1998. At a weigh station for the recently departed, a team of overburdened caseworkers is assigned to help clients choose the single memory they want to take into the afterlife. "Brilliant, humorous, transcendently compassionate," Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times.
The International Film Series is sponsored by the UD Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events, the University Honors Program and the film program in the Department of English. For more information, call 831-4066 or visit the film series web site at <http://www.udel.edu/ lrussell/films99fall.htm>.
Forging a Collection: The Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery" is on display in the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery in the Morris Library now through Dec. 15, and an exhibition program and reception will be held at
4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 5, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room of the Morris Library. The event is open to the public by reservation. To request a printed invitation, contact the Office of the Director of Libraries by telephone at 831-2231 or by e-mail at <UDLA@mvs.udel.edu>.
The exhibition, curated by Timothy Murray, Special Collections, can be viewed from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Friday, and on Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m. There is no admission charge.
"Forging a Collection" is drawn entirely from the collection Frank W. Tober bequeathed to the University of Delaware Library after his death on June 24, 1995.
The collection is composed of nearly 4,000 books and periodicals, hundreds of manuscripts and papers, and a variety of other materials, including artwork and ephemera. Mr. Tober maintained a wide range of book collecting interests including the history of printing and publishing, the history of papermaking, the era of Napoleon and the French Revolution, and contemporary fine printing and the book arts.
The cornerstone of Mr. Tober's personal library was his collection on literary forgery. He assembled a fascinating collection of examples of forgeries from all periods, as well as secondary works about them.
The collection includes material relating to virtually every major forgery from those of antiquity to the cases involving contemporary figures such as Clifford Irving, who attempted to publish a forged autobiography of Howard Hughes, and Mark Hofmann, whose crimes also included murder.
Mr. Tober developed a particular interest in the forgeries associated with the 19th-century British forgers Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman and amassed one of the most important private collections on this topic. He also built strong collections relating to other notable forgers such as the 18th-century British poets Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson; the Shakespeare forgers John Payne Collier and William Henry Ireland; and the 20th-century American novelist Frederic Prokosch.
In addition, he assembled a strong collection of secondary historical, critical and reference material on forgery from all periods.
Mr. Tober also pursued such related topics as literary hoaxes, imaginary voyages, counterfeiting, forensics and the technology of forgery detection. All of these topics are represented in the UD exhibit.
"The exhibition 'Forging a Collection' and its accompanying catalog bring to scholarly notice a major resource for study in a broad range of research topics," Susan Brynteson, libraries, said. "'Forging a Collection' also serves as a fitting tribute to a dedicated book collector and generous friend of the University of Delaware Library." exhibition.
To speed the search for new medicines, pharmaceutical researchers developed techniques to simultaneously synthesize thousands of potentially useful substances, thereby developing vast libraries of chemical compounds.
This mass-manufacturing approach, known as "combinatorial chemistry," is now being applied to the search for new materials, specialty chemicals and catalysts. But, it continues to pose challenges for researchers, who must find new ways to analyze thousands of compounds at the same time.
Tiny, chip-based "laboratories" for characterizing combinatorial results could be the key to faster, more cost-effective discovery.
The latest developments in microscale analysis will be described Oct. 21-22 at UD, as part of a conference on "Microscale Characterization for Materials Discovery."
Top industrial and academic researchers-including National Medal of Science winners George M. Whitesides of Harvard University and John F. Rabolt of UD-are expected to outline their current research.
Rabolt, the only scientist ever to win all four Coblentz Society awards for molecular and vibrational spectroscopy, said he will discuss the possibility of a rapid optical imaging tool that may someday allow the characterization of hundreds of samples simultaneously.
"When you run many simultaneous chemical reactions," Rabolt, chairperson of UD's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, said, "it's hard to keep track of what you're producing. Combinatorial chemical reactions happen so much faster than we can interrogate the system to learn about the resulting product. A parallel optical or spectroscopic technique might make analysis faster, and simultaneous."
Also during the conference, Rabolt said he will discuss efforts to pattern materials using DNA sequences that can be immobilized. "We want to use DNA molecules as the patterned substrate for biospecific reactions and perhaps even devices," he explained. "We can affix certain DNA sequences to a surface. If a complementary sequence exists in a solution of many different DNA sequences, then when we dip the immobilized sequence into the mixture, intermolecular association with this complementary sequence will occur through a process called hybridization."
The resulting double helix will have a "significantly different structure and exhibit different surface properties than the initial, immobilized single-stranded DNA," he said. "Being able to detect the difference between immobilized, single-stranded DNA and immobilized, hybridized DNA by a fast spectroscopic, optical or electronic method is our goal, and would be a substantial accomplishment."
Increasingly, efforts to "downsize chemistry" are setting the stage for chip-based analysis, Rabolt said. Emerging lab-on-a-chip technologies may prove useful for analyzing bar-code DNA sequences, screening drug candidates, rapidly detecting biological and chemical warfare agents or for developing simpler, less expensive clinical tests, according to Rabolt.
In the future, he said, "A device the size of a postage stamp might simultaneously analyze many different substances in hospitals, on the factory floor, in the corn field or at home."
George Whitesides, Harvard's Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry, is one of the world's leading authorities on the fabrication of microsystems. During his Delaware presentation, Whitesides said he will discuss soft lithography, a set of replication techniques that show promise for rapid prototyping, especially of microanalytical and microfluidic systems.
Other speakers at the event will include: Thomas J. Baiga, Charybdis Technologies; Richard J. Colton, Naval Research Laboratory; M. Bonner Denton, University of Arizona; Nathan S. Lewis, California Institute of Technology; William F. Maier, Germany's Max-Planck Institute; Bruce D. Quimby, Hewlett-Packard; Nadrian C. Seeman, New York University; Selim Senkan, University of California, Los Angeles; W. Henry Weinberg, Symyx Technologies; Richard C. Willson, University of Houston; and Daniel W. van der Weide, University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Planning the meeting, in collaboration with the UD Office of Engineering Outreach, are representatives of 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co., DuPont Pharmaceuticals, Astra-Zeneca, DuPont and Hercules.
UD faculty who wish to attend the conference should contact Kathy Werrell at 831-4863, or send e-mail to <werrell@udel. edu>, to obtain the discounted registration rate of $100.
To browse the event web site, visit <http://www.udel.edu/ engg/outreach/conferences/microchar/index.html>.
-Ginger Pinholster
Hornist Cynthia Carr will appear in a free, public recital with pianist Julie Nishimura at 2 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 10, in the Loudis Recital Hall of the Amy E. du Pont Music Building.
As the new millennium approaches, Carr and Nishimura offer a tribute to horn and piano music of the past 100 years. Designed to reveal the full range of 20th-century musical styles, the program includes music composed by Dukas, Hindemith, Dunhill, van Eechaute and Basler between 1906 and 1996, plus works by other composers from France, Belgium, England, Germany and the U.S.
"An incredible pleasure to listen to" was how The Philadelphia Inquirer described Ms. Carr's playing in a June 1994 review. Active as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player, she has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, in Carnegie Hall in New York and on its recording of works of Wagner for Deutsche Grammophon records.
Area performance highlights include her solo appearance in Mozart's Horn Concerto No.4 with the Delaware Symphony, performance as a guest artist at the Wilmington Music Festival, and in Bach's B Minor Mass with the Brandywine Baroque Orchestra. In 1996, Carr released a CD of music for horn and piano by women composers with pianist Julie Nishimura.
Currently a UD associate professor of music, Carr is hornist of the Del'Arte Wind Quintet and Trio Arundel, as well as a member of the orchestra of the Opera Company of Philadelphia and a substitute player with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Oct. 10 concert is sponsored by the Department of Music.
A Faculty/Staff Assistance Program workshop, entitlted "Stepparenting: It's Not a Fairy Tale," will be offered from noon-1:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 5, in Room 130 of the General Services Building. Yvonne Nass, parent education coordinator of Child Inc., will discuss the real world of blended families, including the myths and realities of stepfamilies. The workshop is designed for anyone living with or involved with children of a significant other and offers many "how to" suggestions for these enriching yet challenging relationships.
To register, contact Jean Pasapane at 831-2414 or send e-mail to <jpasapan@udel.edu> by Friday Oct. 1.
