Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 8pm
Far From Vietnam
Far From Vietnam, Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, 16mm, 1967, 120 minutes
"One of the most powerful documentary statements about the opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In fact, I would cite Emile de Antonio's 1968 In the Year of the Pig and the collectively made 1972 Winter Soldier as its only real competitors." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Image Source
Organized under the aegis of SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) and overseen by Chris Marker as a protest of the US involvement in Vietnam, this legendary portmanteau, which features contributions by seven iconic artists, stands as watershed moment for political cinema as well as collective filmmaking. A melange of fictional and documentary elements shot across the US, France, Cuba, and Vietnam, it was a source of some controversy in its time, and remains a provocative and resonant essay on global conflict and life during wartime.
"Far from Vietnam is a film of question marks, of questions we ask ourselves as often perhaps as you. It's for that reason that we put them on the screen: after all, it is as natural for filmmakers to speak on a white canvas as in a cafe." - Alain Resnais
"On the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue in New York, a guy is reciting a poem consisting of the syllables napalm. And no one knows what napalm is. It showed me how blind people become to something they hear referred to all day long. So, we decided to do something a little like Picasso confronted by the bombing of Guernica." - William Klein
Tickets - $6, available at door.