The University of Michigan's

Screen Arts & Cultures' presents:

Wednesday November 18, 2009

The Department of Screen Arts & Cultures and the James Gindin Visiting Artists Series presents

Producer Chip Diggins

at 8:00PM in Chemistry Building Room 1300

Independent producer Chip Diggins is a former Senior Vice President at Paramount who knows the business of Hollywood inside and out. 

Diggins will talk to SAC students about what producers and studio executives look for in a screenplay based on his years at Disney, Paramount and as director Barry Levinson's producing partner at Baltimore Pictures.  He will also discuss how one goes about getting creative executive jobs.

Joining Diggins in this discussion will be SAC Screenwriting Coordinator and Screenwriter Jim Burnstein and his writing partner Garrett Schiff.  They'll share the writers' perspective in dealing with the likes of Mr. Diggins.

Thursday, November 19
7:00 pm; at UMMA's Helmut Stern Auditorium
24 City (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008, 107 minutes)

A masterful new documentary from Jia Zhang-ke – "Not only is the 38-year-old director the most prominent Chinese filmmaker of his generation, he also has come to assume the role of witness and conscience in a society characterized by rapid modernization and a growing amnesia." (Dennis Lim, LA Times, 2008) – 24 City recounts the dramatic and thunderous fall of the state-owned Factory 420, exploring both its physical demolition and its powerful symbolic echo of a half-century of communist rule.

Given the name Factory 420 as an internal military security code, the Chengdu Engine Group was founded in 1958 to produce aviation engines, and saw years of prosperous activity. Now abandoned, the factory awaits its destiny. Sold for millions to real-estate developers, it will be transformed into an emblem of market economy: a complex of luxury apartment blocks called 24 City.

Constructed around eight dramatic interviews, punctuated by snippets of pop songs and poetry, along with beautifully-shot footage of the demolition, 24 City excavates the debris of collective memory and emphasizes the thin boundary between fact and fiction in post-revolutionary Chinese history. It does so by weaving into this oral history three fictional monologues delivered by professional actors. The interviewees represent three generations with ties to the factory: former factory workers, contemporary workers, and their children.

An absolutely mesmerizing experience, 24 City attempts to understand the complexity of the social changes sweeping across China by observing the impact a half-century of Socialism has had on the Chinese people.
* Official Selection, Cannes Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, Toronto Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, New York Film Festival, 2008

“One of the most original filmmakers working today. Without nostalgia but with sensitivity and depth of feeling, Mr. Jia is documenting a country and several generations that are disappearing before the world’s eyes.” - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“The most important filmmaker in the world.” - Stuart Klawans, The Nation

“Poignant and charming. Eloquent testimony to a China that is vanishing with each swing of the wrecking ball…. The memories of the workers in their factory microcosm, and telling documentaries like these, keep the past alive, so that later generations will know what once was, and what’s been lost.” - Mary Corliss, Time Magazine

“24 City brings huge stretches of long-repressed history to life on an intimate scale. Jia, filming with a calm, probing ruefulness, quietly unlocks the floodgates of memory as a crucial first step toward personal and political liberation.” - Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Thursday, December 3
7:00 pm; at UMMA's Helmut Stern Auditorium
FVSA “First Thursday” - “ Southeast Michigan Salon”

The Screen Arts and Cultures Department and the Film Video Student Association (FVSA) present a selection of student video and digital works from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor.  This program is part of a “screening exchange” between students in the Entertainment Arts Program at CCS and the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures here at UM, Ann Arbor.

Thursday, December 10
7:00 pm; at UMMA'a Helmut Stern Auditorium
The Beaches of Agnes, (Agnes Varda, 2008, 100 minutes)

A reflection on art, life and the movies, The Beaches of Agnes is a magnificent new film from the great Agnes Varda, director of Cleo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I, a richly cinematic self portrait that touches on everything from the feminist movement and the Black Panthers to the films of husband Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave.

When one thinks of the major figures of postwar cinema, the name Agnès Varda immediately springs to mind. Her body of work in both fiction and documentary is defined by a wealth of innovation and imagination. Irrepressible and enquiring, she is a force of nature, and even at eighty shows no signs of slowing down. Her new film is a reminder that there are few artists capable of such eloquence in cinema.

Varda takes beaches as her point of departure. Though she was not born near the ocean, she would travel to the seaside every Easter and summer during her childhood, and her memories of these trips act as a springboard for the film's meditation on her early life. She recalls her wartime exile to the coastal village of Sète as a period of endless fun and life jackets. While a young adult, Varda began her career as a photographer before raising a family with her husband, Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and eventually turning to filmmaking. Returning to Sète over a decade after the end of the war, she used the locale and its fishermen as the backdrop for her remarkable first feature film, La Pointe Courte.

Varda weaves photographs, vintage footage, film clips, and present-day sequences into a memorable voyage through her life, during which she confronts the joy of creation and the pain of personal loss, death and aging. It is a singular trip played out against the exciting context of the postwar explosion of cultural expression in France. She knew everyone: her colleagues in the French New Wave, the Black Panthers in California and even Jim Morrison, who would visit when in Paris. Idiosyncratic, engaging and deeply moving, The Beaches of Agnes is a journey through an extraordinary artistic life.

* Winner, Best Documentary, Cesar Awards, 2009
* Winner, Best Film, French Critics Union, 2009
* Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, Venice Film Festival, 2008

Four Stars! “A great, loving, uplifting film.”
– Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Glorious... A remarkable history, rich in comedy and occasionally heartbreaking, filled with wise reflections and strange digressions about the wonders of life.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A work of art in its own right, one of her best—a poignant, rapturously emotional tribute to life itself.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Exhilarating. A lively, visually stunning autobiographical essay… Will no doubt enchant newcomers to her work just as thoroughly as it will captivate her longtime fans. The Beaches of Agnes might be the best film yet from a director who for half a century has managed to inspire, astonish and endure.”
– Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“Extraordinary. Breathtaking. It's difficult not to leave the theater giddy at being swept up in Ms. Vardas’ embrace.”
– Betsy Sharkey, LA Times

“An artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“A masterpiece.”
– Stuart Klawans, The Nation

Lightworks Festival - Fall Term 2009

Friday & Saturday December 18 & 19, 2009

6:00PM to Midnight

Natural Science Auditorium