The following was co-written with Jenny Paxson, an Administrative Assistant at the Packard Campus. Thursday, April 30 (7:30 p.m.) All That Heaven Allows (Universal, 1955) Widow Jane Wyman falls in love with a younger man (Rock Hudson) in a suburban New England town, resulting in an avalanche of public and private shaming. From this deceptively …
My stint as guest programmer continues with a film made in my hometown of Baton Rouge, my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, and a rather jaundiced view of professional football. Thursday, April 23 (7:30 pm) sex, lies, and videotape (Miramax, 1989, *R-rated) It’s a matter of conjecture to pinpoint the beginnings of the American independent film …
Thursday, April 16 (7:30 pm) Les Blank Double Feature: Hot Pepper (1973) / Always for Pleasure (1978) Documentarian Les Blank (1935-2013) might have been born in Florida, but he had a Louisiana soul. Tonight’s double feature is all the evidence you need. Hot Pepper celebrates the music of Clifton Chenier, the “King of Zydeco,” while …
This blog post was co-written with Jan McKee, Reference Librarian, Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress. In addition to providing access to the Library’s recorded sound collection, the Recorded Sound Research Center also maintains a collection of reference books. These books include discographies, bio-discographies, directories, histories, and technical works about sound recording and radio broadcasting. …
I am guest programmer for April, and this week features the most recent film by my favorite director working today, another representing the great flowering of American cinema in the 1970s when I really fell in love with the movies, and the first silent film I ever saw, the one that set me on my …
Folklorist Norm Cohen has astutely observed that “[f]olklore thrives where danger threatens” (The Long Steel Rail, cited below, p. 169). The annals of commercially recorded traditional and popular song provide abundant support for this conclusion. In fact, by the early twentieth century — especially the decades of the teens and twenties — nearly every imaginable disaster or mishap was memorialized in song. Natural disasters are …
