The following are film write-ups by the faculty members who will be introducing each of the three unlikely classics at this year’s ODU ONFilmFest, which takes place over there next four days.

Easy Rider
7 pm Thursday, March 25
Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building, Rm. 1012
By Dr. Joe Cosco, associate professor in the Department of English

Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Jack Nicholson. Can it get any better than that? For this unregenerate child of the Sixties, probably not.

Seriously, though, I first saw Easy Rider when it came out in 1969–and was totally blown away. But then again, 1969 was prime time for getting blown away. That year I wandered into a musical festival called Woodstock, and got blown away. The year before Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Students, African-Americans, women, and police were fighting pitched battles over civil rights, the Vietnam War, capitalism, and the heart and soul of America. America’s youth was turning away from the materialism, conformity, and intolerance of their elders, believing in the promise of a purer counterculture.

It was in this context that Easy Rider literally exploded onto the big screen. “Shot on a budget as thin as a coke straw and written under the influence of various controlled substances,” as one critic put it, this classic buddy/road film managed to become one of the most important films of the Sixties.

Shot in less than two months for under $370,000, it was one of the first successful independent, low-budget films that paved the way for a new wave of great directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. The film broke with Hollywood conventions by using anti-hero characters, uneven pacing, jump cuts and flash forwards, improvisational dialogue and acting, and contemporary rock music for a soundtrack. And what a soundtrack it was: the Byrds, the Band, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf…

Traveling from California to Mardi Gras and beyond, our two easy riders, Billy and Captain America, seek their field of dreams out on the open road, where so many of us Americans have sought the freedom, hope and adventure of movement so central to American dreaming.

Interesting that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper claim they were trying to make a Western. The bottom line is they wound up making a terrific film. Although sometimes a bit heavy-handed and didactic,  Easy Rider confronts head-on many of the major themes in American life – conformity, bigotry, freedom, protest, the road, violence, and the dreams and nightmares of the Sixties.

Film critic Rex Reed said about the film: “I couldn’t shake what I had seen even after I left the theater.” More than 40 years later, Easy Rider still packs its punch to the gut.

Paradise Now
4 pm Friday, March 26
University Theatre
By Dr. Fran Hassencahl, assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts

The question of attribution for Paradise Now when nominated for the Best Foreign Film Award at the 2006 Academy Awards speaks to some of the issues addressed in the film. Should the film made by a Palestinian engineer, Hany Abu-Assad, turned film director and screen writer be designated as a film from Palestine, the Palestinian Authority or from the Palestinian Territories? Should the film be shown, because some believe that it encouraged terrorist acts? Others argued that the Academy should consider only films from recognized states. In an interview with webzine, “IONCINEMA,” Abu-Assad states that he tells a story, which shows the complexity of the situation in Palestine and examines what factors motivate people to participate in terrorist acts. He adds that his goal is not to make an anti-Israel diatribe, because “I can use four words to say that, I do not need to make a 90 minute film, spend two millions and risk everybody’s life.”

Viewers will see a film that reflects the suspense and difficulties of everyday life in Palestine. In that respect the film is a thriller, because we view the final countdown as two young men prepare for their suicide mission. Paradise Now also follows an art film convention by leaving the audience room to speculate whether Said seated on a bus with Israeli soldiers and civilians detonates or does not detonate the bomb he wears under his suit. The two young auto mechanics do not make these decisions lightly. They are motivated by feelings of revenge, powerlessness and a desire to restore family reputation rather than fulfilling the stereotype of the brainwashed or lured by promises of the luxuries of an afterlife. Anyone interested in exploring these issues further is invited to participate in a discussion group on campus sponsored by the Better Understanding Club. We are currently reading “Terror and Suicide Attacks: An Islamic Perspective.”

Fitzcarraldo
2 pm Saturday, March 27
Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building, Rm. 101
By Dr. Frederick Lubich, professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature

Born in 1942 in Munich, Germany and raised in the Bavarian mountains, Werner Herzog became by all accounts the most adventurous film maker of Germany’s New Cinema since the late 1960s. Often breaking the genre boundaries between documentary and feature film, he produced a wealth of visually stunning works of art which explore time and again the most challenging and forbidding regions of our planet, such as the deserts, the rain forests, the world of active volcanoes, and the realms of the eternal ice. In recent years, the London Times counted his documentary Grizzly Man (2005) about the American Timothy Treadwell and his fatal attempt to live with bears in the wild among the five best films of the last decade. In 2009, Herzog was nominated for an Academy Award for his Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World.

In addition to his fascination with nature, Herzog has always been intrigued by the twilight world of the mystical and demonic, where genius and madman meet. His most famous artistic monument to this world is Fitzcarraldo (1982). It is the story of a man around 1900 who is determined to not only conquer and exploit the raging Amazon and its Peruvian rain forest but to also build an ostentatious opera house in the middle of its spectacular jungle in order to bring Caruso, Italy’s most celebrated tenor of that time, to perform there. The character of Fitzcarraldo is played by the German actor Klaus Kinski who would establish himself with his performances in this and subsequent Herzog films as well as with his own histrionics in real life as the arguably most authentic madman in international cinema. Thus, Fitzcarraldo stands as the exemplary cinematographic testimony to a German Romanticism, in which the wilderness of nature and the glory of culture fuse into an ecstatic and delirious synthesis, which can be considered unique in world cinema. Not surprisingly, Time Magazine declared Herzog in 2009 as one of the one hundred most influential personalities in the world today.