Opening this week: Boccaccio ’70 (pictured) is an omnibus film featuring four of Italy’s greatest auteurs (Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, and Mario Monicelli) paired with some of Europe’s greatest stars (Sophia Loren, Romy Schneider, and Anita Ekberg)! We have a great introduction up on our website by Professor Karen Pinkus (Comp Lit/Romance Studies), who references the film in her new book Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema. Incidentally, you can get a 30% discount off the cover price of Clocking Out by using the code BOCC70 on the University of Minnesota Press website.
Also opening this week is Cane River, a genuinely lost film for almost forty years. Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, Cane River is a racially-charged love story in Natchitoches Parish, a “free community of color” in Louisiana. It delves into the tensions within and between the Black and Creole communities, and is an absolute must-watch film, part of our Black Lives on Screen series. One can’t help but wonder what American independent cinema might have been like if Horace B. Jenkins hadn’t died shortly after completing the film. Available now in a new restoration, A.O. Scott of the NY Times calls it “a lost treasure of independent cinema.”
And our reservations window opens up for our final screenings of the Fall semester! Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands was a huge international success and for decades was the highest grossing film in Brazil. It’s easy to see why: after the death of her philandering husband, Doña Flor marries a stable, but sexually underwhelming, pharmacist, and is shortly thereafter visited by the ghost of her first spouse, who is more than happy to fulfill her needs. RSVPs are also open for The Killing Floor, praised by The Village Voice as the most “clear-eyed account of union organizing on film.” In dramatizing the true story of the WWI-era attempts to organize an interracial labor union, The Killing Floor depicts the racial and class conflicts seething in Chicago’s giant slaughterhouses, and the brutal efforts of management to divide the workforce along ethnic lines, setting the stage for the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.
