Featuring such blockbusters as this summer's alien-bashing hit "Independence Day" and Roman Polanski's horror classic "Rosemary's Baby," the Dartmouth Film Society hopes its newest installment of veritable Hollywood classics and new-age flicks will cause as much hysteria as its title suggests, "Cinema Paranoia."
This term's venue offers a cinematic panorama of films which plays on audiences' phobias and also caricatures some of our more outrageous fears.
Michael Ellenberg '97 and Mobina Hashmi '96 suggested the theme after watching "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" a film in this term's series. "Cinema Paranoia" embodies those elements in cinema which draw people into the paranoia of it, Ellenberg said.
The DFS series begins today with Ridley Scott's paean to futuristic paranoia, "Blade Runner." This science fiction flick stars a young Harrison Ford as a blade runner whose job it is to destroy a gang of renegade androids.
Scotts paints a grim future full of violence and human degradation.
Probably the most known film on the DFS marquee is "Independence Day," the extra-terrestial-unfriendly action-adventure starring Will Smith as the cliche-wielding savior of the world. This film highlights paranoia of the alien kind in that this time the little green people are not as human-friendly as Steven Speilberg's "E.T."
"Independence Day" includes a star-studded cast including Smith, Bill Pullman as the U.S. president, and Jeff Goldblum.
Other notable selections from the series include "Them!," a movie centered on our fear of communism via killer ants and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," whose theme plays on our phobia of the enemy within any of us.
Stanley Kubrick's Cold War-themed "Dr. Strangelove" marks the middle of the series. Starring Peter Sellers as the U.S. president and George C. Scott as his win-at-all-cost adviser, the film notes the tensions of U.S.-Soviet relations of the time and parodies the sentiments of many people in the '50s and '60s.
"Safe," a film playing near the end of the DFS season, illustrates our paranoia in environmental proportions.
The air is fingered as the mysterious cause of an allergy which inflicts the film star, Julianne Moore.
Also Terry Gilliam's movie starring cover-boy Brad Pitt in a most unglamourous role of a psychotic patient and Bruce Willis as an unwillingly time-traveler plays at the end of the DFS series.
"12 Monkeys," based on "La Jetee" a French film which the DFS is also showing this term, depicts an dark, apocalyptic future for the world unless Willis is able to pinpoint and change its course. The Loew Auditorium will headline a series devoted to "Italian Americans" on Thursdays this semester. The series created in conjunction with the Comparative Literature 64 on Italian American culture, will feature Spike Lee's expose on interracial relations, "Jungle Fever" and the mafia-influenced "The Godfather, Part III" during its run.
DFS tickets to the "Cinema Paranoia" series are $15 for the general public and $10 for Dartmouth students.
Loew term passes, for Thursday and Saturday films only, are $25 for the general public and $20 for Dartmouth students.
