FLLAC outdoor film series disturbs, engages

Jackson Reeves Assistant Arts Editor

Audience members watched the unerving and frank depiction of ostracized, sideshow “freaks” with physical abnormalities in Taylor Hall last Thursday March 27. Tod Browning’s horror film Freaks, the first installment of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s (FLLAC) film series, featured a midget, an armless women, conjoined twins and a bearded woman. The Vassar and Poughkeepsie community can be unsettled yet again tonight, April 3, when the FLLAC presents Eyes without a Face.

FLLAC Coordinator of Membership, Special Events and Volunteer Services Jennifer Cole explained that film offers more ways to experience art. “To have that on the wall—well, in the galleries—and on the screen is a really interesting experience for the viewer,” said Cole.

FLLAC will show both art and popular films every Thursday until June 5 at 7:30 p.m. on the lawn in front of the museum, or in Taylor Hall 203 in case of cold or rainy weather. The film series presents films from the 1920s to the present century and includes Un Chien Andalou, Seconds, Pumping Iron, Altered States, The Thing, Silence of the Lambs and Being John Malkovich.

Most of the films are horror films or contain significant horrific aspects. This theme has been taken as a reflection of our culture, framing body abnormality as the ultimate sin. In art, sin and horror seem to fall hand in hand.

Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator Mary-Kay Lombino chose the films for FLLAC’s series to complement the problems with defining a proper body appearance introduced in the exhibit she curated, Out of Shape: Stylistics Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection. Seeing any of the films from the series in the context of the exhibit gives that film artistic merit. “When you do see it in relation to some of these other films, it has more of an ability to address some of these artistic issues head-on,” Lombino said. “Movies might be the more lasting ideas of that very moment that the movie was made.”

Cole runs the Late Night at Lehman Loeb program, a weekly event held on Thursdays. Cole wanted to use the film series to show the Vassar and Poughkeepsie communities the range of entertainment and education that the art center can offer by presenting popular film as one of the extremities of the artistic spectrum.

The film series reveals not only the problem with popular notions of appropriate body image, but also the artistic value of popular films. Art is something that makes you think and initiates conversation, which both Cole and Lombino contend that these films accomplish.

“There’s something about art that lends itself to passionate discussion—good or bad, indifferent, it doesn’t matter,” Cole said. “Anything can be debated.”

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí wrote and directed Un Chien Andalou. The film, shown last Thursday, March 27 along with Freaks, unfolds nonlinearly through the use of Freudian dream logic in which anything can associate with anything else. Cutting a woman’s eye with a razor transitions to ants emerging from a hole in a man’s hand and slides to a man trying rape the woman. Un Chien Andalouuses film to add the temporal dimension to previously only spatial surrealist art, exemplified by Dalí’s paintings.

“You are able to experience it more as a real dream because you’re watching a narrative,” Lombino said. “Some of the techniques are very similar to the other works that they were making, such as montage.”

Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to Her will be shown on June 5 as the final film of the series. Produced over 70 years after Un Chien Andalou, the film explores the same problems of dream logic in its linear narrative about comatose women and the men who love them. One particularly Freudian dream involves a miniaturized protagonist jumping into the vaginal crevice of the comatose ballerina whom he desires. The symbolic complexities of the dream logic in Talk to Her raise it to the same artistic level as the art filmUn Chien Andalou.

French horror film Eyes without a Face from the late 1950s and American horror film Silence of the Lambs from the early 1990s both depict bodies whose skin has been violently removed and later used to reconstruct new bodies. Eyes without a Face follows a father’s Frankensteinian impulse to give his daughter a new face after an automobile accident disfigures her original one.

Silence of the Lambs follows the attempt to capture a serial killer who uses the skin of his victims to make a new body for himself. Skin becomes a medium in itself in each film thanks to the unconventional uses of it. The transformation of a commonplace material into a medium gives both films artistic merit.

The FLLAC film series illustrates how the film medium has at various points in its brief history attained the status of art. And art “gives you the ability to go on a journey with an artist, whether it be a filmmaker or a painter or a sculptor,” said Cole.