[9.5.13 - 10.24.13] 4 Films on the History of Socialism
Please join the Platypus Affiliated Society for every second Thursday (beginning Sept 5) for a film series that examines the history of socialism from the Second International to the New Left.
The first two films in the series are part of the 2013 NSPIRG Rad Frosh.
// The Second International (1889-1914)
5 Sept @ 7pm (Dalhousie Art Gallery)
Rosa Luxemburg (1986, 122 min, dir. Margarethe von Trotta (German with English Subtitles))
Cannes Palme D’Or nominee and Best Actress winner (for Barbara Sukowa’s luminous performance), this is a sweeping biopic of radical socialist Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919).
// The Russian Revolution (1917)
19 Sept @ 6pm (Dalhousie Art Gallery)
Reds (1981, 195 min, dir. Warren Beatty, English)
A film about John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World on the Russian Revolution, and Louise Bryant and their Greenwich Village milieu, including Emma Goldman, Eugene O'Neill, Max Eastman and others during the early years of American Communism, directed by Warren Beatty and starring Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson.
// The 1930s Old Left
10 Oct @ 7pm (Room 307, Dalhousie Student Union Building)
Cradle Will Rock (1999, 132 min., dir. Tim Robbins, English)
A drama based on real events about theater life in the 1930s during the times of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration, the Red Scare (anti-communism), fascism, unions, Hitler, Mussolini, New York mayor Nelson Rockefeller, director Orson Welles, painter Diego Rivera, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. The film focuses on the lives of several people during hard times in New York as many struggle to find their place in America. The main focus of the film is a play titled Cradle Will Rock, which tells a pro-union story about lower class workers trying to survive in a growing power-hungry world.
// The 1960s New Left
24 Oct @ 6pm (Dalhousie Art Gallery)
Le fond de l'air est rouge (Grin without a Cat) (1977, 180 min, dir. Chris Maker, French, Spanish, English, and German with English subtitles)
Chris Marker’s epic account of the rise and fall of the New Left. Part One, “Fragile Hands,” charts the growth of the student-protest movement amid a background of Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the Red Brigade, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara, climaxing in the events of 1968. Part Two, “Severed Hands,” analyzes the movement’s tortuous decline, both from outside aggression (in Czechoslovakia and Chile) and internal dissension.
