One of the many reasons people choose to live in New York is because you can get things there you wouldn't normally find in your average city. One of these things is great cinema.
Imagine for a moment that there is a place just like that nearby that shows poignant and rare, foreign and independent films. This is truly not a difficult feat, thanks in large part to OFFScreen.
Created in the fall of 1998, OFFScreen began as an offshoot of the Virginia Film Festival. Several students wanted a way to show the films that couldn't make it into the Festival.
Regarding their history, OFFScreen President Andy Lilienthal said, "There were people that were interested in showing films that you couldn't see anywhere in the English speaking world. What OFFScreen effectively did in less than a couple years was bring 12 films a semester of what they considered the best, rarest, most original styled films."
Fortunately, for cinephiles on Grounds, in Charlottesville and in the tri-state area OFFScreen has continued to do so. With the help of Richard Herskowitz, the artistic director of the Virginia Film Festival, and other supporters such as The Hook, UPC and Regal Cinemas, OFFScreen has remained in existence and is now in its eighth season. And it's bound to be a season to remember. This semester, OFFScreen is upping the ante in terms of message, cinematic milestones and filmic originality.
"Choosing the films is very chaotic --people have lots of ideas of what they want to bring," Lilienthal said. "What [the artistic directors] found when they made the schedule was that they had five films that centered around the idea of death and killing, tangentially. The question is, 'What are people thinking around the world about death?'"
This question was the starting point for the "Killer Film Series," which launched the season for OFFScreen. The first film, The Proposition starring Guy Pearce, premiered Aug. 27 to a sizeable audience and much excitement. The next four films progress from the Western perspective to the introspective to the Middle Eastern perspective and then come full circle to end with an Australian romantic/death comedy.
The "Killer Film Series" is one of several new facets of OFFScreen this season. In October OFFScreen will premiere its first of two double features. The first film of the night is a documentary about master cinematographer Henri Langlois and the second film was directed by his prodigy Jean-Luc Goddard. The second double feature will top off OFFScreen's fall season.
In addition to bringing the double feature to Grounds, OFFScreen is bringing the first American film viewing of Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. This 1969 film focuses on the French resistance, which Melville himself had been a part of, in classic film-noir style.
Keeping with their convention of screening foreign and independent film means choosing films that many in this area and many in the English-speaking world would otherwise not see. One such film is 4. This Russian picture is a sci-fi thriller whose distribution was censored due to its controversial nature. This is a film that people may not be prepared to see.
"This film is going to be known many generations beyond ours," Lilienthal said. "It's stylistically completely original. Most people don't know what it is but it's a Russian film that'll end up probably redefining some sense of style."
4's uniqueness, cinematic potential and its narrative content are all aspects of what OFFScreen tries to bring to Charlottesville each Sunday. They believe the messages in these films are important.
"America especially, now largely the world, gets information through images," Lilienthal said. "These are the images from around the world; this is what people are saying. They're delicate constructions and they're different from anything else."
It's important to note that OFFScreen is not endorsing any of these messages but they are simply acting as the medium through which these views are available. This role is highly important for a country and a world that is becoming globalized and that is purportedly shrinking with each mouse click.
Considering the nature of the independent film business, one wonders how long OFFScreen can keep this role. The independent film world is highly mercurial and distribution companies come into and go out of business very quickly because of the non-commerciality of the films they purchase. Many films are not bought by the distributors and in the past OFFScreen has gone straight to the director to bring these films to Charlottesville.
"Some of the films we bring, they only make three copies of the print and they circulate it throughout the world and we end up with one of them," Lilienthal said. "These get in disrepair in less than a few years so we only have a small window to get them."
Despite these difficulties, OFFScreen has persevered and is very proud of their work as an all student-run, non-profit organization. OFFScreen has created a space in which a living cinema, a film viewing audience, can inhabit. This is a space in which worldviews can be shown and accessed.
"It's important for other perspectives to be out there," Lilienthal said. "We show non-commercial films; we show the movies that by their definition will not get shown."
OFFScreen films premiere Sunday nights at 7 and 9:30 p.m. in the Newcomb Theatre. Tickets are $3. Double Features are $5. Meetings are held at 5:30 p.m. in the Newcomb basement before the screenings.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
