Professor Pix Film #2: Close-Up, 1990 Directed Abbas Kiarostami November 14, 2024, 6 pm Lincoln Center Campus Visual Arts Complex Film Screening Room SL24L Open to everyone. Pizza is served at 6, and the film screening starts shortly after Film discussion moderated by Professor Fadi Skeiker, Professor Ashar Foley, and Professor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock Sponsored by the LC Dean’s Office and Professor Connections funding
“Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.” —Criterion
What is Professor Pix? Each season, we ask professors in the Visual Arts Department and special guests to present significant films to the Fordham community. At screenings, we enjoy pizza together, watch a movie, and then discuss it afterward. So, step outside your regular streaming queue, experience something different, and join our community of merry cinephiles throughout the semester. It’s called Professor Pix, and it’s fun—so bring your friends!
Dear Visual Arts Majors, Minors, Professors, Administrators, and Cinema Lovers,
Each season, we ask professors in the Visual Arts Program to present significant films to the Fordham community. At screenings, we enjoy pizza together, watch a movie, and then discuss it afterward. So, we invite you to step outside your regular streaming queue, experience something different, and join our community of merry cinephiles throughout the semester. The series is called Professor Pix, and it’s a visual and auditory blast—so join us—and bring your friends!
With La Dolce Vita (the Sweet Life), Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini vividly described the journeys of a protagonist through the vortex of 1960s socialites in Rome. With Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 homage, The Great Beauty, the meanings and messages are updated for a new generation. On Wednesday, March 6th, at 6:30, the Professor Connections Program and the Visual Arts Program will co-sponsor the first Rose Hill Edition of Professor Pix! with Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, selected by Professor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
Sorrentino stated that one of the inspirations for his movie was the statement by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert that he wished to write a novel about nothing. “By ‘nothing,’ he meant the rumors and gossip, the thousand ways we have of wasting time, the things that irritate us or delight us but that are so short-lived that they make us doubt the meaning of life. That ‘nothing’ makes up many people’s entire lives.” Sorrentino also wanted to depict “the great thing about life, the fact that you can be surprised by something that you’d decided was vulgar and wretched, and then suddenly what is vulgar and wretched reveals its own entirely unexpected grace.”
How could a film supposedly about nothing be so captivating and full of grace, you ask? Come find out.
Wednesday, March 6th, at 6:30, Rose Hill Campus, Keating Lower Level Visual Arts Studio B08.
Pizza and camaraderie courtesy of the Professor Connections Program and Visual Arts.
The Fordham University Visual Arts Program would like to announce this memorial exhibition, The Muse was Life; the Medium Was Film: Films by our charming resident contrarian Ross McLaren and his students in our Lincoln Center Visual Arts Complex Susan Lipani gallery.
Ross McLaren died in November of 2023, days short of his 70th birthday, after suffering a stroke earlier in the summer. Ross was a Canadian-born filmmaker, curator, colleague, teacher, and mentor living in New York who taught at Fordham University since 1986. This memorial exhibition highlights Ross’ dedication to the film medium and his influence on generations of Fordham University film & video students.
We miss his presence and take solace in the many memories he leaves behind. If Ross were here today, he would be holding court, telling stories, quick to share a toast, and likely one of the last to leave. There was only one Ross, unique as each of his films. In life, there is an endless continuation of frames; we thank Ross for sharing the ones he pulled from it.
Three monitors in the gallery space present Ross’ work. On monitor #1 is his infamous 1977 (27.75 min) film Crash ‘n’ Burn, shot on 16mm black & white film with an overdubbed soundtrack, documenting the Toronto, Ontario, Canada punk rock scene. On monitor #2 is Sex Without Glasses,1983, (12.75 min), a color, 16 mm film “starring a preverbal somnambulist floating between word and object.” –RM. And on monitor #3 is a selection of films that Ross admired from other filmmakers, including a range from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to cartoons about Porky the Pig.
Monitors #4 and #5 display nine short works (eight by Ross’ students over the years, one by a colleague): Spencer Balter, 5 am Thoughts at 3 in the Afternoon; Masha Bychkova, Gag; Alex Chambers, Cameraless Animations; Matt Gioia, Quick Sand; Liam Kenny, Joy, and Love for All Things in the Garden; Luke Momo, The Stamp Collector; Booch O’Connell, Affirmations; Glen Redpath (friend), Ross’s Rooftop Garden; Koty Vooys, Leaving NYC.
Fully circling the gallery and connecting Ross with his students are his used Super-8 film cartridges, a further reminder of Ross’ continued love of the film medium since the early days when he founded and was the first director of the Funnel Film Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
A memorial event in the Susan Lipani Gallery will occur on Friday, February 16, at 6 pm.
The Visual Arts Program would like to thank the Filmmakers’ Coop, who provided the 16mm print of Crash ‘n’ Burn and a digitized version of Sex Without Glasses, and special thanks to FCLC Dean Auricchio and FAS Dean Hume for funding the memorial event.
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Joseph Lawton arranged this memorial with the assistance of Gallery Programmer Vincent Stracquadanio. Anibal Pella-Woo and Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock oversaw digitizing Crash ‘n’ Burn. Student films were collected and organized by Slav Velkov, Colin Cathcart, Eamon Redpath, and Glen Redpath, who assembled the list of Ross’ favorite movies, and Wilson Duggan installed the exhibition.
Featuring: Cat Applebaum, Spencer Balter, Julia Boberg, Sara Lockett, Arina Medvedeva, Madison Nash, Erin Newtown, Booch O’Connell, Caroline Wong
The Fordham University Galleries December 6, 2023 – February 7, 2024 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Every fall, Visual Arts majors persuing their thesis projects work together in the Senior Seminar course to discuss and develop their work – and to support one another in realizing a solo or two-person exhibition in the spring. This show presents a selection of the works produced, to date, by those students.
The poetic exhibition title was conceived of by the students. It reflects both the overlap and the differences in their projects, which come together to touch on themes of loss, chance, movement, memory, the unspoken, trauma, obfuscation, and, as one student wrote in her statement, “the loud and incessant beauty of living.”
“the loud and incessant beauty of living” comes from the statement of BoochO’Connell
