Information and calendar are available here.
UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Fowler Museum present
HIGH NOON FILM SERIES AT THE FOWLER MUSEUM
Wednesday, June 25 – Wednesday, July 23
Splash into summer with a film series celebrating creatures—real and imagined—from the sea. Come for the movies and stay to visit the Fowler’s exhibition, “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.”
*FREE admission! (no reservations required)
*NOTE: Venue is the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Lenart Auditorium, Room A103B. Info: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu / 310.825-8655.
THE ARCHIVE AT OUTFEST
Friday, July 11 – Saturday, July 19
The Archive is proud to be a part of Outfest: The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival through its partnership in The Outfest Legacy Project, a collaborative effort to collect and preserve queer film and video. Several films screening during this year’s Festival have been restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive or are part of The Legacy Project collection.
*NOTE: Programs will screen at various venues. Info/tix: http://www.outfest.org / 213.480.7065.
PRESERVATIONIST’S CHOICE: Selected Hits from the Archive’s Festival of Preservation
Friday, July 25 – Wednesday, August 13
For this special summer series, the Archive asked its crack team of preservationists to reprise or update a presentation from one of our past Festivals of Preservation. They came back with an eclectic program of surefire crowd-pleasers—and a few new surprises! Archive preservationists will be on hand each evening to share the telecasts, newsreels, outtakes and films being screened and to discuss their work preserving our shared cultural heritage. So here’s your chance to see some of your favorite Festival of Preservation shows again; or if you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to see what all the fuss was about!
*NOTE: The Archive’s next Festival of Preservation will be held March-April, 2009.
The Lloyd E. Rigler and Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive present
SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL: The Escapades of Busby Berkeley
Friday, August 1 – Tuesday, August 12
After directing parades as a lieutenant during WWI, Busby Berkeley returned stateside to work with Florenz Ziegfeld on Broadway. The stage led to films when Eddie Cantor (another Ziegfeld protégé) suggested that Berkeley choreograph the dance routines for Samuel Goldwyn’s saucy Whoopee (1930). Although he began his career with Goldwyn (the pre-Code Cantor vehicles are incredibly racy—who could resist the ditty, “Bend Down, Sister!” sung by a chorine of scantily-clad bakers) Berkeley’s career skyrocketed when he moved to Warner Bros. Conceived during the depths of the Great Depression, films such as 42nd Street (1933) and the Gold Diggers series, offered a salve to moviegoers eager for uplift. Berkeley delivered in ways unforeseen: using his single-camera technique, he careened in and out of the showgirls’ legs but also took time to give each of them a close-up. They were all beautiful, why shouldn’t the audience look at them, he conceded, indeed, why not look at hundreds of them? Thinking primarily of the men in the audience, Berkeley appealed to biographer Martin Rubin’s idea of the “seraglio effect:” by placing women in no-men-allowed environments—locker rooms, dorms, changing rooms—the women could be free of inhibition, penetrated only by the viewer’s gaze. With a dip in musical popularity in 1938, Berkeley moved to MGM where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were foisted on him to put on a show that neither group were particularly interested in. Soon the brilliant Berkeley was demoted to dance director and come 1941 he was suffering from alcoholism, depression and increasing conflicts with his co-workers. There were still a few grand ideas percolating, however: water was a muse for both he and Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and bananas had never carried as erotic a charge as when they danced with Carmen Miranda in The Gang’s All Here (1943).
