ANDY FISH

ANDY FISH is a comic book artist

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Film Classes

I ran film classes at WAM, mostly over the summer, and mostly to expose people to films they might not have seen, or might not have seen on the big screen.  We set up a projector, served popcorn and ran a film on Friday nights for a small audience of devoted film goers.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray from DOUBLE INDEMNITY
One season we did Hitchcock films, most likely summer since his films have a warm weather feel to them.  Another we covered THE HISTORY OF THE HORROR FILM where I screened things like CABINET OF CALIGARI (1919) all the way up to THE SHINING (1980) with a nice mix in between.

Probably my favorite was the FILM NOIR series we did, because we'd open it up to discussion afterwards as to whether or not the film shown was actually film noir-- a very finite category of dark cinema that has to have certain ingredients to make it pure film noir;

1. A protagonist who gets in over his or her head, due to greed or lust or both.
2. A femme fatale (or the male version of such) who leads them to a path of destruction.
3. Dark shadowy cinematography.
4. A dark ending.

It was fun to show things like STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1941), long regarded as one of the first film noirs and then classify it as not (happy ending).  The standard is DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) for those of you following along at home.  It has all of it.

In the years since, we've discussed the idea of bringing the festival back and it looked like it might be on track--including having all new posters commissioned by local and national artists unique to the showings--

Who knows?  If we can iron out some of the specifics you'll be the first to know.  I