This Fall semester, the CSUN Cinematheque celebrates the contributions of women to film, television, and other media industries.  Our international retrospective includes classic works by noted auteurs and prizewinning contemporary creators.  We are especially excited to host honored guests who include film critics, animators, producers, writers, and directors.

Select PRINTABLE calendar (.pdf) 

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Antonia’s Line

(d Marleen Gorris 1995, Netherlands) 104 min. -- Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Described by critic Janet Maslin as, “a work of magical feminism,” Marleen Gorris’ fourth film is the first feature film directed by a woman to win an Academy Award (1996).  An enchanting celebration of self-determinism and self-reliance, the film follows Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy)  and her descendants as they build a quirkyand loving community.   A beautiful, poetic, and sometimes hilarious film.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Dance, Girl, Dance

(d Dorothy Arzner 1940, US) 90 min. -- In 2007, Dance, Girl, Dance was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry

Dorothy Arzner, who worked in the motion picture industry first as a writer and editor, is the only woman to direct for the major studios during the Golden Age of Hollywood.  Maureen O’Hara stars as Judy, an aspiring, struggling ballet dancer.  Trouble ensues when she and burlesque dancer Bubbles (an early featured role for Lucille Ball) become romantically involved with the same man.  This is considered one of Arzner’s best films, a treatise on ambition and female friendship.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

The Hitch-Hiker

(d Ida Lupino 1953, US) 71 min.

Ida Lupino set aside her career as a successful leading lady, acting opposite such well-known stars as Humphrey Bogart, to start her own production company, Emerald Productions aka The Filmakers.  This taut and primal thriller, the first film noir directed by a woman, is based on the crime spree of Billy Cook, who murdered six people in 22 days. Lupino abandoned her signature style of sweeping crane shots for claustrophobic close ups in this tale of Ray (Edmond O'Brien) and Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy) who unknowingly pick up a sociopath (William Talman) on the run from the law. The two friends plot an escape, but the hitchhiker's peculiar physical affliction, an eye that never closes even when he sleeps, make it impossible for them to tell when they can make a break for it.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Critics Night

Join us for a panel of renowned film critics:

• Claudia Puig, President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association
• Carla Renata, African American Film Critics Association, NPR All Things Considered
• Meher Tatna, President of the Hollywood Foreign Press

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

La Pointe Courte

(w d Agnes Varda 1955, France) 86 min.

The most acclaimed woman filmmaker of the modern era, Agnès Varda has contributed to cinema as a writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, and director of both fiction and documentary.  She has always been considered ahead of her time – in filmmaking technique and political commentary. It is this film, not a film by Godard, Resnais, or Truffaut, that inaugurated the French New Wave. A young man (Philippe Noiret) who is a native of the seaside village of La Pointe Courte, France is having a hard time understanding why his bored, Paris-born wife (Sylvia Montfort) of four years is unhappy with their marriage. The couple visit La Pointe Courte as they try to resolve their problems. Meanwhile, the locals of the rural community grapple with the hardships and tragedies of their daily lives.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Sadie

(d Megan Griffiths 2018, US) 96 min.

Described by Variety critic Joe Leydon as "Equal parts coming-of-age story and slow-burn thriller…[this] quietly absorbing and methodically disquieting drama is a genuine rarity.”  Megan Griffiths is an award-winning writer and director whose work includes both film and television.  Sadie, her sixth feature film, stars Sophia Mitri Schloss in a breakout performance as the titular character, a troubled thirteen-year-old who may be a budding sociopath.  The film also stars Melanie Lynskey and Tony Hale.

Ms. Griffiths will introduce the film and do a Q/A after the screening.

Plenty

(1985.  w David Hare  d Fred Schepsi) 124 min.

Meryl Streep delivers a tour de force performance as a former World War II French Resistance fighter who has trouble fitting back into formal British society after the war. Featuring a diverse esteemed cast including Tracey Ullman, Sting, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir John Gielgud, and Sam Neil––based on the Tony Award play by David Hare (The Reader, The Hours)––this is an arresting drama of a woman fighting to find her voice.

Lecture:
Dr. John Schultheiss
Professor, Department of Cinema & Television Arts

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Make It Move:  Women in Animation

• Shawna Mills – Dreamworks,  Lucasfilm, Cartoon Network
• Sidney Clifton – Black Panther animated series, Hellboy

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Danzón

(d María Novaro 1991, Mexico) 120 min.

Marìa Novaro, one of the first women to study film at the Universidad Nacioanal Autónoma de México, is the leading female director of her generation.  Danzón, her second feature,premiered at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes and brought her international recognition and accolades, including a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film.  Each Wednesday night, Julia (María Rojo), a single middle-aged mother, escapes the doldrums of her boring job as a telephone operator by traveling to a dance club in Mexico City. There she meets up with her longtime dance partner, Carmelo (Daniel Rergis), and they spend hours dancing a popular Cuban dance known as the danzon. But, when Carmelo doesn't show up one night, Julia embarks on a long and whimsical journey to find him -- a journey on which she learns a thing or two about herself.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Raw

(d Julia Ducournau 2016, France/Belgium) 99 min.

It might be an urban legend, but the story goes that during a screening at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival some audience members allegedly fainted due to the horror film’s graphic scenes. Maybe, maybe not, but the 91% approval rating by Rotten Tomatoes warns of the film’s lurid violence and sexuality along with its deep, beautifully realized, symbolically rich meditation on primal hungers of all kinds.A lifelong vegetarian veterinary student discovers after a hazing ritual that she has an insatiable craving for meat---and soon not just any kind of meat. Raw was screened during the International Critics’ Week section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival where it won the critics’ prize.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Women of CTVA

Faculty members Karen Dee Carpenter, Alexis Krasilovsky, Elizabeth Leister, Thelma Vickroy, and Dianah Wynter share their work and experiences as award-winning media makers.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Orlando

(d Sally Potter 1992, UK) 94 min.

Sally Potter, who began her career writing, directing, and composing experimental film, creates complex work that challenges both conventional cinema and society.  Potter’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel features Tllda Swinton in the title role of the nobleman Orlando, who lives four centuries in the film, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman.  With this film, Potter attempts to “restore to people the sense of themselves which has nothing to do with gender, time, or circumstance.”

Out of the Past

 (1947.  w Geoffrey Homes [Frank Fenton, uncredited]  d Jacques Tourneur)  97 min.

Out of the Past is often described as the quintessential film noir:  a tenacious detective (Robert Mitchum) spinning his wheels against fate, a beautiful woman (Jane Greer) up to no good, a moneyed mobster (Kirk Douglas) with a shark’s grin, double-crosses, fall guys, shadowy rooms, bleak souls.  This movie was re-made as Against All Odds (1984) and added to The National Film Registry in 1991.

This is another in a series of screenings inspired by motion picture posters in the CSUN Gallery Of Film Poster Art’s Hollywood Worldwide exhibition; specifically, Retorno al Pasado (Out of the Past), Spain, 27” x 38”––Main Corridor, Manzanita Hall.

Lecture:
Dr. John Schultheiss
Professor, Department of Cinema & Television Arts

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Night Catches Us 

(d Tanya Hamilton 2010, US) 90 min.

Major stars Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie help relive complex and controversial race relations in a tense Philadelphia of 1976.  A group of former members of the Black Panther party deal in their own way with the return of one of their own after a number of years away. In her first feature film, director Tanya Hamilton audaciously combines a dazzling array of storytelling devices and modes, from documentary to animation in an effort to bring understanding to a difficult time in American history.

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Take Care of My Cat

(d Jeong Jae-Eun 2001, South Korea) 112 min.

This festival darling, shot by an all-woman crew, is a bittersweet tale of five girls who, just out of high school, try to negotiate the expectations of adulthood. As the girls struggle to maintain their close relationships which each other, each of them must contend with a social order that treats them as “less than.”  Writer/director Jeong Jae-Eun deflty handles the variation of tone and mood to deliver an incisive portrait of contemporary Korean women and the issues they must contend with: sexism, classism, Confucianism, and ethnocentrism.  

Wednesday Night at the Cinematheque
SHE MAKES MEDIA

Lipstick Under My Burkha  

(d Alankrita Shrivastava 2016, India) 117 min.

Indian Art-house favorite Konkana Sen Sharma is featured in an ensemble cast of women of varying ages, religions and social backgrounds living in the same neighborhood in Bhopal.  The repressions of their age, gender and religion cause them to rebel in small, but meaningful ways.  The four ordinary women have to lie, steal, cheat, and hide in order to live the lives they desire. This bawdy black comedy was initially denied a release in India after the country's Central Board of Film Certification refused to issue a certificate, stating that "There are contagious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one particular section of society."  Some cuts and compromises ensued, and the resulting film managed to be both a critical and commercial success.