Breckenridge Festival of Film

50 Years Ago…

Join Dr. Clark Farmer for screenings and discussions of two classic films that capture American life in 1957.

Peyton Place (dir. Mark Robson, 162 minutes)

One of my student’s mothers told her that without Peyton Place, there would have been no sexual revolution. While perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, it is certainly true that no other film captured the seething sexual underbelly of the seemingly staid 1950s, bringing to the open taboo topics like incest, homosexuality, and abortion. The 1957 film followed fast on the heels of Grace Metalius’s 1956 novel, which sold more than 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release, and became the best-selling American novel since Gone With the Wind. Set in a small New England town in the 1940s, the story follows the lives of three women as they come to terms with their identity as sexual beings. Lana Turner gives a blistering performance as the sexually-repressed mother of an illegitimate daughter, who has to confront the hypocrisy of American family values and discover the vixen within.

A Face in the Crowd (dir. Elia Kazan, 125 minutes)

The poster lets us know we aren’t in Mayberry: “POWER! He loved it! He took it raw in big gulpfuls… he liked the taste, the way it mixed with the bourbon and the sin in his blood!” Never one to shy away from political controversy, director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) tackled the increasingly popular phenomenon of television, envisioning what effect it would have on American elections. Andy Griffith turns in the creepiest performance of his career as Lonesome Rhodes, a country thug who turns his appearances on first radio and then television into a full-fledged political movement. The film focuses on the dark side of populism, the way that the masses in the era of television can be swayed against their own interests through carefully constructed folksiness, something that continues to this day with politicians and TV pundits. Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau round out the cast as naïve liberals who help Rhodes rise to fame, and set the groundwork for his eventual downfall.

The Film Studies Program of the University of Colorado at Boulder is nationally recognized for its diverse and innovative course offerings. It is especially known for its many areas of specialization, including narrative, documentary, experimental, and animation film. It is also known for its commitment to interdisciplinary teaching with a special emphasis on film and the visual arts. The late Stan Brakhage taught for over twenty years and his legacy remains central to the vision of Film Studies. Chaired by Professor Daniel Boord, the Film Studies department has a distinguished faculty including Jim Palmer, Phil Solomon, Melinda Barlow, Suranjan Ganguly, Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz, Clark Farmer, Kathleen Man, Jerry Aronson, Don Yannacito and Bruce Kawin. The program has a large collection of 16mm film prints for classroom use as well as cameras, film and digital video editing equipment, and optical printers which are available to students. Over 350 Film Studies majors are now enrolled in the program and its students have won national honors, including the Nisson Award, three Princess Grace Awards, and three Student Academy Awards, as well as numerous regional prizes.

When it was conceived in the mid-1960s, the CU Film Studies Program offered just two courses, Narrative Film and Film Theory, taught through the Departments of English and Humanities. During the 70s and 80s, Film Studies expanded in two directions - production and critical studies. NEA grants and University support made it possible to acquire filmmaking equipment and, concurrently, critical studies classes were expanded using faculty from other departments and talented local artists and scholars.

By the late 80s, the University and the state legislature recognized the value and impact of this program and approved both a BA degree in Critical Studies and a BFA degree in Film Production. The Critical Studies degree focuses on the study of the nuances of film as an art form and the Film Production degree focuses on the art of independent filmmaking. Film Studies also offers an interdisciplinary MFA degree with the Department of Art and Art History. Students in the first two years of either degree program are required to take courses in other art disciplines, in addition to several introductory film courses. At the upper division level, the curriculum tends to emphasize critical study of film and film production.

In 1989, the C.U. Film Studies Program began its association with the Breckenridge Festival of Film to educate and bring a new perspective on film viewing to Festival audiences. Each year, program professors screen a pair of related films and lead discussion on the productions themselves and on their significance - in relation to each other, to advances and trends in the technical or creative aspects of filmmaking and/or to the times and cultures in which they were produced. The initial program explored traditional vs. modern Japanese cinema and those since have included the experimental films of Stan Brakhage, a Hitchcock retrospective, the films of Germany, Spain, India and China, a tribute to Billy Wilder and, on the eve of the new millennium, a sci-fi take on the future as seen in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1926’s Metropolis. The 25th Anniversary Festival included two ‘Movies About The Movies’ featuring The Stunt Man (the first film screened at the inaugural Breckenridge Festival of Film) and Robert Altman’s The Player.

For more information on the CU Film Studies Program, please contact: Film Studies Program, Campus Box 316, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0316. Call: (303) 492-7574 or log on to: www.colorado.edu/FilmStudies