UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 16, Page 4
January 5, 1995
World-class films in series

     The University's 1995 Winter Session film series will feature
world-class cinema from France, Germany and Canada.
     Scheduled at 7:30 p.m. on Sundays throughout the month of
January, the free public screenings will be held in Room 130 of Smith
Hall and are sponsored by the Performing Arts Series.
     Opening the series Jan. 8 is Germinal, the story of the robust
miner Maheu (played by Gerard Depardieu), his large family and an
ambiguous outsider named Lantier, who boards with them. With
meticulous detail and striking imagery, the film, in French with
English subtitles, captures the grueling, almost surreal inferno of
the mines, the brutal living conditions and earthy pleasures of the
working class, as well as the yawning gap between rich and poor. For
all its unsparing depiction of personal loss and political repression,
this 1994 film's overall impact is stirring, not downbeat.
     On Jan. 15, The Boys of St. Vincent, the gripping drama of moral
darkness and difficult justice based on disturbing events in Canada
and elsewhere, will be shown. The St. Vincent orphanage for boys is a
revered Newfoundland institution known for its good works and crack
hockey teams. Its hallowed halls are also a closet of sadism and
pedophilia, regularly inflicted by the Catholic brothers on their
helpless charges. Although the 1994 film aroused a storm of
controversy and legal action in Canada, its target is not Catholicism
but more general issues concerning the abuse of power, the absence of
moral accountability and the destructive tendency of the establishment
to close ranks and protect itself at any cost.
     Scheduled for Jan. 22 is A Man Escaped, the story of Resistance
leader Andre Devigny's escape from a Nazi prison in Lyon just hours
before he was to be executed. This French movie, shot in 1956 at
Montluc, reconstructs Devigny's experience of solitary imprisonment
and the infinite preparations for escape.
     Concluding the series Jan. 29 is Olympic Summer, a 1994 German
film with subtitles. A stylistic tour de force, this haunting tale of
lost innocence tells the story of a good-natured village youth who
takes a bicycle trip to Berlin in the momentous summer of 1936, when
the eyes of the world were on the Olympic Games and the rising Third
Reich. He quickly comes under the spell of a wealthy widow who keeps
him a virtual prisoner at her idyllic lakeside retreat. The emotional
and historical dimensions of the poignant story are considerably
enriched by the film's deliberately archaic style: only narration,
music and sound effects are heard. There is no dialog.