Reunion: Saturday Night At The Movies
Here’s a special treat for the auteurs, cineastes, and plain old flic-hounds amongst us: The Reunion Committee is pleased to present “Reunion Saturday Night at the Movies,” curated by Yale’s own Dudley Andrew, the R. Selden Rose Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Film Studies. See more about Professor Andrew’s spectacular career in teaching about film, below.
In recognition of who we are — and why we are on campus — Prof. Andrew will screen Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), a collaborative film by famed director Alain Tanner and novelist John Berger.
The screening will start at 8:30 pm on Saturday night, at the Loria Center (map), which is right next door to the Art and Architecture Building on York Street, just a few steps from our Davenport reunion venue.
Made in the aftermath of the intense, theatrical, and utopian political upheavals of the late 1960s, Jonah is Tanner and Berger’s vision of how these children of the Revolution made a kind of peace with their present, while looking to a transcendent future that would emerge from the failed and disappointing past.
Pauline Kael adored Jonah, describing it as a “bubbleheaded political comedy”. Vincent Canby said the movie is both “cerebral” and “exuberantly humane.”
Prof. Andrew will provide a context for the film, and lead an open discussion of it after screening.
Prof. Andrew recommends (but does not require) that attendees “prepare” by viewing Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, his 1983 (future-star-studded) confection about reconciling the lives we anticipate with the lives we end up living. It’s available on Amazon Prime and Apple iTunes.
You may also appreciate previewing the possible inspiration for The Big Chill, that is, John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), the DVD of which can be purchased on Amazon.
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About Dudley Andrew, Ph.D.
James Dudley Andrew is a well-regarded American film theorist who has taught at Yale since 2000. Before moving to Yale, he taught for thirty years at the University of Iowa. Andrew has been called “one of the most influential scholars in the areas of theory, history and criticism”. He particularly specializes in world cinema, film theory and aesthetics, and French cinema. He has also written on Japanese cinema, especially the work of Kenji Mizoguchi. He has been given a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. In 2011, he received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Achievement Award. He is currently chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale.