Urbanity on Film

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Whitehorn Community Association screening last week!  It was a blast and the films were fabulous as always.  They looked great up on the side of the CAMPER and while it was a trek out to the suburbs to see them, it was well worthwhile.   This weeks program is a little more accessible – although depending on your point of view, the U of C campus can be just as confusing and intimidating at Whitehorn.

The University is a strange little suburb all on its own.  A city within a city.  As an ex-student of the campus, I can vouch for the fact that if you live on it, there is very little reason to leave (with the few exceptions of a few bar-trips).   The University campus has everything that you could ever need: housing, food, entertainment, education all in one sprawly package.   It has built itself its own great little community of students that live there, students that feel like they live there and other professionals that can actually leave before 11pm at night (sometimes).  I think that the program we’ve put together for tonight’s screening compliments the location, a little city that is designed for thinking and discourse, and of course, a little youthful fun.

Tonight’s package includes films like “Blissfully Ignorant” and “Lines of Oblivion” that question and disrupt concepts about modern society, culture and power structures.  In the same way that University environments exist to support political and activist activities like protests and questioning authority (to a certain extent), these films question our modern viewpoints and values.  They look at how our society exists in a heirarchy, run by large corporations with capitalist interests and how that affects the rest of us that are not at the top of the ladder so to speak. In the same lines, “Red Men Rising” examines our capitalist culture with humor and horror.  Communist zombies attack the City of Winnipeg and free the poor from the oppression of the rich.  “But what happens when they run out of rich people’s brains?”

Other films like “Piensa En Mi” is a beautiful examination of the daily commute on 16mm film.  With a gorgeous film print, Alexandra Cuesta examines the daily routine of someone riding the bus in Los Angeles.  In large cities, our daily commutes from home to work and back take up much of our day, and is often regarded as a nuisance.  Cuesta’s film forces us to examine something that we would normally ignore, to turn off our ipod’s and to watch, listen and enjoy the changing environments and forgotten peoples that make up such a large part of our daily lives.

Education is in large part a change in one’s perspective and looking at the world.  Like Cuesta’s film, Roger Beebe’s “The Strip Mall Trilogy” re-examines our surroundings and re-contextualizes them.  With children growing up in suburbs and strip malls, the nature of their learning has changed, and is very different than the education of their parents or grandparents.  Beebe shows us that we can learn and play with the simplest of ideas and images, and in the process, turns a strip-mall into a classroom.

Join us tonight outside of the University of Calgary Art Parkade for these films and more!  Keep an eye out here for updates next week on the final leg of the program, as well as more writing and commentary about the films.   Show starts at 8:30 tonight and remember to bring a sweater!