Press Release

October 2, 1996

Classic Films Highlight the Virginia Film Festival

Charlottesville, VA: The Virginia Film Festival, October 31 through November 3, 1996, is devoted to making classic films come alive on the big screen. "While other film festivals concentrate entirely on premieres, our Festival places new films in the context of the classics which continually inspire great filmmakers, from Scorsese to Tarantino," said Festival Director Richard Herskowitz.

In the Wild and On the Road

The Festival is divided into two portions -- In the Wild on Thursday and Friday, and On the Road on Saturday and Sunday.

The first half of the Festival, In the Wild, explores the cultural roots and the attitudes towards the landscape and environment, which inform the road movie. According to Herskowitz, "the defining American experience of conquering the frontier and subduing the wilderness shapes many westerns and road movies, and through them our thoughts." The image of the desert, the ultimate frontier in which a hero can stand tall or be crushed, is explored in a variety of films, from John Ford's neglected masterpiece Wagon Master (part of a "Mormons in the Desert Double Feature" with James Benning's Deseret) to the "urban desert" film Red Desert.

Irrigation and technology promise to turn desert into garden in the classics Wild River and Chinatown (doubled with Pat O'Neill's great experimental feature, Water and Power), but the promise is suspect. Derek Jarman's The Garden, paired with two Peter Greenaway shorts on water and landscape, provides an Englishman's view of the desert-garden struggle, as the artist creates an impossible garden in a barren landscape.

"The second half of the Festival will examine the history of the road movie, the most distinctively American genre since the western. We will feature a classic road film from each decade, from the 1930s with It Happened One Night to the '90s with Speed," explained Herskowitz. The intervening decades are represented by The Grapes of Wrath (1940), North by Northwest (1959), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Two Lane Blacktop (1971), and Paris, Texas (1984). "We are particularly excited to be showing Two Lane Blacktop on its twenty-fifth anniversary, and Bonnie and Clyde on its thirtieth anniversary," continued Herskowitz. Bonnie and Clyde will also be the featured film in this year's Regal Film Workshop with Roger Ebert. "For good measure," Herskowitz concludes, "we found a new Icelandic road movie, Cold Fever, which shows how well this genre can survive export and harsh weather."

A series of Women on the Road movies, co-sponsored with the Women's Center, begins at Vinegar Hill Theater on November 3. This series adds a feminist viewpoint and ten more great road movies, including Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, Thelma and Louise, and Louise Brooks' Beggars of Life, to the Festival's retrospective of a genre generally considered to be male-defined.

Premiere of Road Movie Classic, Profession: Reporter

Peter Wollen, an eminent film scholar as well as screenwriter and director, is coming to the Charlottesville event to present an American premiere screening of Profession: Reporter, the uncut, European version of The Passenger, which Wollen co-wrote. One of two films to be shown during the Festival by legendary director Michelangelo Antonioni, Profession: Reporter stars Jack Nicholson as a man who escapes from his own reality by assuming the identity of an stranger. Profession: Reporter will be shown at 4 p.m. at the Culbreth Theatre on November 2. The festival will also screen Antonioni's Red Desert at 10 p.m. on October 31 in the Culbreth Theatre.

Film Preservation Foregrounded

The importance of film preservation has always been an important theme at the Virginia Film Festival. A regular feature of the Festival is a special preservation program from the Library of Congress, hosted by Library curator Patrick Loughney, who will present this year The Virginian and Girl of the Golden West. These two classic silent westerns by Cecil B. DeMille will be accompanied by local pianist Art Wheeler.

North by Northwest, shown courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, will be introduced by its star Eva Marie Saint, who will be joined by the film's screenwriter Ernest Lehman for a post-screening discussion with film scholar Jeanine Basinger. Mr. Lehman, who was nominated for five Oscars, will also introduce Sweet Smell of Success, the ultimate Hollywood film about the New York Cityscape, on Friday, November 1 at the Regal Cinema at 10 p.m. and will join fellow writers Frank Pierson and Peter Wollen on Saturday for the annual Screenwriters Panel.