Oklahoma City University’s Film Institute will open its 37th annual international film series at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 5 with Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show.” The screening is free to the public in the Kerr McGee Auditorium of the Meinders School of Business at N.W. 27th Street and McKinley Avenue.
“The Power of Place” serves as the theme of this year’s series. More than just setting, place can be nostalgic or haunting.
“It may be mythic or menacing,” said Tracy Floreani, director of OCU’s Film Institute. “It can be as specific as a room in a house or amorphous as an entire watery landscape. Place informs our personal identities, familial and national identities. People connect to place, or feel displaced; fight for a place, or flee it.”
In “The Last Picture Show,” a group of young people in a lonely Texas town struggle to come to terms with the weight of growing up, first experiences with sexuality, and the imminent closing of the one theater in town—the place most inextricably tied to their sense of childhood.
Filmed entirely in black and white, like Bogdanovich’s later hit film “Paper Moon,” “The Last Picture Show” is considered one of the seminal films of the New Hollywood movement and is enshrined in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Featuring stellar performances (including Oklahoma’s own Ben Johnson), beautiful cinematography and a powerful story, “The Last Picture Show” is considered one of the greatest portraits of the complications of American adolescence and small-town life.
A discussion about the film will follow the screening for those who wish to stay. For more information about the series, visit the Film Institute website at okcufilmlit.org.
Other dates and films in the series will include:
- 2 p.m. Sept. 16, Ziad Doueiri’s “The Insult” (Lebanon)
- 7:30 p.m. Oct. 3, Feras Fayyad’s “Last Men in Aleppo” (Syria)
- 2 p.m. Oct. 21 (Halloween special), Guillermo del Toro’s “El espinazo del diablo” (“The Devil’s Backbone”) (Spain)
- 7:30 p.m. Nov. 7, Martin Zandvliet’s “Under Sandet” (“Land of Mine”) (Denmark)
- 2 p.m. Nov. 18, Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” (New Zealand)
- Time TBD Dec. 1, Sterlin Harjo’s “This May Be The Last Time” in conjunction with the Bass School of Music (Oklahoma USA)
- 2 p.m. Jan. 20, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Maborosi” (Japan)
- 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6, Vincent Paronnaudand Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” (Iran/France)
- 2 p.m. Feb. 17, Ritwik Ghatak’s “A River Called Titas” (Bangladesh)
- 7:30 p.m. March 6, Agnès Varda’s “Faces Places” (France)
- 2 p.m. March 17, James Sheridan’s “In America” (Ireland)
- 2 p.m. March 31, Michael Radford and Massimo Troisi’s “Il Postino” (“The Postman”) (Italy), in conjunction with the annual Thatcher Hoffman Smith Poet Series “Picturing Poetry”
