EYES WIDE SHUT (Through the Looking Glass Series) $6-$9
Saturday February 10, 2007
from
7:30pm -
10:09pm
$9, $6 Students, Seniors, Members
$2 service fee for online purchases

(1999/color/159 min.) Scr: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, based on a novella by Arthur Schnitzler; dir: Stanley Kubrick; w/ Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sydney Pollack.
"The man who could create a whole new universe with each undertaking chose the bedroom as the last frontier, to the point where prolonged conjugal conversations mark the dramatic high points in a long, winding, and surreal story. In Arthur Schnitzler's 'Dream Story,' a 1926 Viennese novella that is stark and haunting, a doctor and his wife are teased apart by sexual jealousy as the husband is drawn into 'a wild, shadowlike succession of gloomy and lascivious adventures, all without an end.' Part of the film's sustained tension comes from the slow, ribbonlike way in which these episodes unfold; part of it comes from the viewer's complete uncertainty about what will happen next . . . As in dreams, odd details stand out in bold relief . . . and [Stanley] Kubrick deploys certain colors, most notably red and blue. The conjugal life is bathed in red, at first, and death and danger in blue-until the film begins switching and juxtaposing them incessantly to create underlying tension . . . The film's subliminal manipulation is already at work."—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times
Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole...)
January 19, 2007–February 24, 2007
"The world is much deeper but also more transparent than we think.... And the magic of film consists in the possibility to express any phenomenon you want. That's why I like it so much. Sometimes you may think that I am out of touch with reality, but in fact I am a part of reality, that's all."—David Lynch
 | Rene Magritte's enigmatic paintings, with their deadpan humor and emphasis on monumental objects, were created during a century that saw the birth of both cinema and psychoanalysis and, in the words of LACMA's senior curator of modern art, Stephanie Barron, continue "to appeal to modern audiences hungry for the puzzling conjunctions of the everyday and the fantastic." Though the concept of parallel realities existed in the Victorian era, it was cinema that could induce a dreamlike state in the viewer and depict the visual landscape of the unconscious. |
Lewis Carroll's "looking glass" is perhaps our most famous metaphor for the irrational, but it is also an ancient symbol with a variety of meanings: vanity, duplicity, madness, schizophrenia, and hallucination among them. Not surprisingly, many of the films in this series are thrillers, and many depict characters whose obsessions become pathological or self-destructive. For filmmakers like David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Jacques Rivette, the "looking glass" is the cinema itself, and the silver screen is the mirror through which we, the audience, pass. At its most mythic, death is the unknown land that lies on the other side of the looking glass: in Orphée and Vertigo, the characters journey into the mirror to steal a loved one back from Death itself. Alternatively, films such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz depict imaginary landscapes peopled by delightful and menacing creatures. And in virtually all the films in the series, the audience, like the characters, must ask itself: what is real, and what is fantasy? |
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Added by
kiracle
on January 21, 2007
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