Acclaimed composer Alicia Svigals and exhilarating Canadian pianist Marilyn Lerner will accompany a rare screening of The Yellow Ticket (1918) on October 26, as FSC’s event series begins again this fall at the Logan Center for the Arts.
Svigals, who has composed for violinist Itzhak Perlman and the Kronos Quartet and helped found the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, has crafted a lush score inspired by klezmer and other Eastern European folk forms, classical composers such as Béla Bartók and Ernest Bloch, European café music, and contemporary improvisation. She will be joined by Lerner, whose work spans the worlds of jazz, improvisation, klezmer and 20th century classical music.
Remarkably progressive for its time, The Yellow Ticket is the first film to explore Jewish discrimination in Tsarist Russia and stars famed Polish actress Pola Negri, Hollywood’s first European silent film star. It tells the story of Lea, a young woman who hides her Jewish heritage to study medicine.
Directed by Victor Janson and Eugen Illès and filmed partly on location in German-occupied Warsaw during the last year of World War I, The Yellow Ticket was one of Negri’s first films for Germany’s leading studio UFA and was released in the U.S. by Paramount in 1922. The film is based on Abraham Schomer’s 1911 Yiddish melodrama, Afn Yam un “Ellis Island” (At Sea and Ellis Island) which was subsequently produced on Broadway in 1914 in an un-authorized English-language version written by Michael Morton.
Grad students in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies are honing their curatorial skills on an array of exciting projects. Supported by the FSC’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program, Michelle Menzies is organizing a rare exhibition and symposium with avant-garde artist Anthony McCall in February.
We’re celebrating! Twenty years ago this fall, the Film Studies Center threaded up its first reel, dimmed the lights, and screened its first film in Cobb 307. Thousands of films and videos later, we are celebrating our 20th anniversary with a new home in the Logan Center for the Arts, a new environmentally sound film vault for the ever-expanding collection, and a renewed enthusiasm for cinema and media studies in an era of expanding technologies.
Donning hard hats and reflective vests, CMS faculty, students and staff explored the new Logan Center for the Arts on a preview tour in mid-March. Though still under construction, the state-of-the-art Film Screening Room and Film Vault are on their way to becoming exceptional resources for the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Starting in October, the new facilities will house most CMS courses, public events and media collections. The multi-format screening room is equipped to show everything from film to digital to 3-D in a comfortable, acoustically isolated, 130-seat theater.
