EVENTS 2008-2009
Upcoming events:
| HUNGARIAN FILM SERIES: MIKLÓS JANCSÓ: TWO MASTERPIECES Special thanks to Bunyik Entertainment and the Magyar Filmunió. |
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THE ROUND-UP / SZEGÉNYLEGÉNYEK (1966) Set at the tail end of the 1848-49 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence against the Habsburg Empire, The Round-Up depicts gendarmes employing "enhanced interrogation techniques"
against the last remaining rebels to break their will and ferret out the chief of a rebel army. The film, not entirely authentic in its historical details, was rightly seen by Hungarians as a thinly
disguised parable about the Communist terror after the 1956 Revolution. The Round-Up is the first film showing Miklós Jancsó as one of the major innovators of cinema, with its long unedited tracking shots running to several minutes in places, and its use of the wide screen in stark black-and-white, so befitting for the haunting landscape of the Great Hungarian Plain (cinematographer Tamás Somló). The other innovation of Jancsó's direction is the precisely choreographed movement of figures in a landscape. All this contributes to create an unforgettable image of the diabolical nature of totalitarian power. Nominated for a Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival; one of the most important European films of the Sixties. |
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RED PSALM / MÉG KÉR A NÉP (1972) Arguably Jancsó's masterpiece, and the pinnacle of his unforgettable visual style. The film's subject is a brutally suppressed agrarian revolt in the late nineteenth century; Jancsó stages the event as a hallucinatory pageant of color, movement and music. In some thirty astonishingly choreographed shots (most films have hundreds) the camera circles the actors, using a zoom lens to catch fleeting details and to subtly alter the viewer's perception of space. The actors sing and dance for most of the time - this is Jancsó's ultimate homage to Hungarian folk dancing, which was his initiation into art and comradeship as an anti-Nazi activist during WWII. Film historian David Cook describes Red Psalm as "a film of nearly perfect formal beauty, great humanity, and awesome cinematic power." Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) writes: "May well be the greatest Hungarian film of the 60s and 70s, summing up an entire strain in [Jancsó's] work that lamentably has been forgotten here." Winner of Best Direction at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. |
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EARLIER EVENTS
February 4, 2009 at 2:00 pm- Radicalism, Morality, Islam and Authority in the Kyrgyz Republic (with a comparative endnote on Albania)
Lecture by David W. Montgomery
Center for Ethics, Room 102, 1531 Dickey Drive
February 5, 2009 at 4:30 pm - Victor Yampolsky Lecture: “Shostakovich and Shakespearean Protagonists”
Reception following, White Hall 207
Victor Yampolsky, Professor of Music and Director of Orchestras at Northwestern University, is well known to audiences around
the world for his highly regarded abilities as a conductor and his impressive talent as a violinist. He is also one of the most
knowledgeable interpreters of Russian music, particularly the music of Dmitry Schostakovich.
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV THE OPERA: A LECTURE WITH CARYL EMERSON
Friday, December 5 - TBA, 2:00 p.m.
Contact Mikhail Epstein for additional information.
RUSSIAN FILM SERIES: THE STRAY DOG CAFE MEETING
Thursdays, (October/November) - White Hall, 7:00 p.m.
Contact Elena Glazov-Corrigan for additional information.
WORKSHOP: A CHILL FROM THE CAUCASUS: The Russo-Georgian War and its Implications
(in partnership with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology) -
October 16, Cox Hall 1-2, 4:00-9:00 p.m.
2 panel workshop featuring:
Panelists: Mikulas Fabry, Melissa Gayan, Don Jackson, Stephen Rapp, Theresa Sabonis-Helf, Ronald Suny, Hubert Tworzecki
Moderators: Matthew Payne, Adam Stulberg
Contact Esther Suh for additional information.
CULTURAL CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN CENTRAL ASIA: Khalkas of Mongolia and Buryats of Siberian Russia
October 3, Anthropology Building, Rm 206, 1:00 p.m.
Professor Rick Taupier is Associate Director for International Research, Office of the Provost, at the The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He also serves as Director of the Manjushri Institue of Buddhist Studies.
Contact Esther Suh for additional information.
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