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.

Open to everyone.