"Mary, Norman & Me: Our Favorite Movies" is being presented in celebration of the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center's 30th anniversary. Begun in the fall of 1973 as the film exhibition program of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, this program has been from the beginning a three-way collaboration, and has evolved into a long-standing friendship amongst three disparate individuals who have virtually only one thing in common: their love of the movies. Of course, this collaboration has extended far beyond the three of us (Mary Riepma Ross, Norman Geske, and Danny Lee Ladely) because the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center has always been and continues to be a community effort. This "list" of favorites should in no way be construed as being definitive. Putting together such a list is fraught with difficulties and frustrations and, by necessity, must be subjected to serious editing. Just how does one decide from amongst literally thousands of fondly remembered choices (and many forgotten ones as well) just which are the favorites? The finished, combined list was much longer than could be accommodated in our limited available time frame. Some of the films were hard or even impossible to find. Several of the best choices are already showing regularly each semester in the UNL Film Studies series screened on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. The list tends to be comprised of older films reflecting our respective ages. Most importantly, the list is comprised of seminal works, films that made a difference in our lives and in the history of the cinema. We hope that they are among your favorites as well and that you enjoy them as much as we do. -Danny Lee Ladely, Director, MRRMAC

by Werner Herzog (Germany; 1972; 1 hr, 34 minutes)

Based on the journals of Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is director Werner Herzog's hallucinatory tale of Spanish colonialists searching for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, in 16th-century Peru. When the travelers reach an impasse, a scouting party is assembled to search for any traces of the mythical empire. As they attempt to forge their way through the dense jungle, more and more of the party falls ill while their ruthless leader, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), grows increasingly insane. Widely considered to be Herzog's finest film, AGUIRRE, which shares much in common with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, highlights the director's visionary approach to filmmaking. Like Coppola's film, accounts of AGUIRRE's shooting are laced with legendary incidents, such as the time Herzog reportedly held a gun to Kinski's head to get him to finish a scene. Whatever transpired between Herzog and Kinski, it made for astonishing cinema, as evidenced by the actor's haunting performance and the entire film's powerfully hypnotic mood.

by Robert Bresson (France; 1966; 1 hr, 35 minutes)

A little donkey is suckled by its mother, then baptized "Balthazar;" a girl and boy say goodbye at the end of summer: a vision of paradise. Years pass and the now-teenaged Marie (Anne Wiazemsky, later Godard's wife and star, and today a celebrated author) finds herself drifting into more and more destructive situations, including involvement with a local juvenile delinquent; while Balthazar moves from owner to owner, some relatively kind, some cruel, some drunkenly careless. But, as critic J. Hoberman pointed out, "this is the story of a donkey in somewhat the way that Moby Dick is about a whale." God, as ever in the work of legendary filmmaker Bresson, is in the details: the elliptical editing, with its abrupt cuts, off-screen space, and as much focus on the hands of the non-pro cast as on their faces; sound design alternating between classical music and natural sounds; the accumulation of cruelties endured by Marie and Balthazar; and the religious symbolism, from baptism to martyrdom - with the silent Balthazar transformed into a patient, long-suffering saint ("the most sublime cinematic passage I know." - Hoberman). In a body of work known for its purity and transcendence, BALTHAZAR is perhaps the most wrenching of Bresson's visions, voted 19 in the 2002 BFI Sight & Sound critics and filmmakers poll of all-time great films, and 9 in the Village Voice's poll of the greatest films of the 20th century. "Bresson's greatest film and one of the masterpieces of the 20th century." - Molly Haskell. "Absolutely magnificent... one of the most significant events of the cinema." - Jean-Luc Godard. "Extraordinary sensuality. . . it stands by itself." - Andrew Sarris.

by Jean-Luc Godard (France; 1964; 1 hr, 35 minutes)

Jean-Luc Godard continues his fascination with dime store novels and American crime films with BAND OF OUTSIDERS, a free-spirited romp in the same vein as the director's breakthrough smash, Breathless. The story follows two friends, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), who are searching for a way to make a big score. When Franz meets the beautiful Odile (Anna Karina) and she informs him of a large chunk of cash her aunt keeps hidden in her house, the duo are convinced that this is their lucky break. Odile is a sensitive young woman who, out of fear and guilt, opposes their plan, Arthur and Franz coax her to go along with the idea. When the time comes to pull of the heist, a miscalculation delays the seemingly perfect plan, resulting in a confrontation that has dire consequences. More traditional than Breathless in its technical execution, Godard's film nonetheless sparkles with freshness and originality by using a comical, poetic narration (by Godard himself), as well as Michel Legrand's bouncy score. As the ambiguous threesome, Karina, Brasseur, and Frey each give performances that combine satirical melodrama, overflowing hipness, and moving sincerity, providing the film with its heart, and making it much more than a mere genre reworking.

by Louis Bu�uel (France; 1972; 1 hr, 41 minutes)

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE is Luis Bu�uel's scathing and surrealistic political comedy masterpiece about a wealthy group of friends repeatedly prevented from beginning their elaborate dinner by increasingly strange events. No matter how hard they try to enjoy the meal and the privileges money affords, everything from closed restaurants to terrorists conspire to thwart their pleasures...and soon it seems that the violence is even pervading their dreams. Academy Award Nominations: 2, including Best (Original) Story and Screenplay. Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film.

Richard Myers was the first filmmaker to participate in the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center's Film/Video Showcase in 1973. He visited again in 1985. We're bringing him back again in celebration of MRRMAC's 30th anniversary.

"Since 1960 I have been involved in making films based primarily on my dreams. I want viewers to experience my work as if they were dream journeys or myths, using myth as a means of unification of reality and as an intermediate and indispensable stage between conscious and unconscious cognition. Dream images never seem limited to the usual kinds of experience possible during the waking state. In dreams we move from place to place, time to time, free of the restrictions that gravity and circumstance place on us during our normal waking lives. We dream our dreams with the freedom of film!"-Richard Myers

"It is Myers' great and particular gift to be able to give exquisitely precise objective form to the stream of his consciousness so that it evokes a profound sense of recognition. Through Myers' so eloquently expressed dream world we're able to perceive the entire panorama of the specifically American imagination. It's as if he's trapped our collective subconscious."-Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

by Federico Fellini (Italy; 1963; 2 hr, 18 minutes)

Federico Fellini's Oscar-nominated 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of storytelling and cinema. The most autobiographical of Fellini's films, this surreal motion picture follows a 43-year-old film director who is having a midlife crisis. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is floating in a midpoint with his life and his work; in the opening sequence, Guido, suffocating, is caught in traffic with the windows of his car locked shut. He climbs out of the sunroof and literally rises up over the highway into the clouds, seemingly free, when he realizes there's a rope tied around his ankle that is violently pulling him back to earth. Cutting from this dream to the health spa where Guido is trying to recapture his creativity and write the screenplay for his next film, his vices become clear: Guido is self-absorbed, and he's distracted by the fabulous cast of actresses, intellectuals, and eclectics who have joined him at the spa. Additionally he struggles with Freudian complexes about his wife (Anouk Aim�e), his lover (Sandro Milo), his ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), and his dead parents; and his repressive Catholic guilt follows him like a haunting mist. 8 1/2 is beautifully choreographed with flashbacks, dream sequences, exaggerated fantasy scenes, and magical surrealist episodes, making it one of the richest, most exuberant movies ever made, in the mode of Fellini's artfully abstract La Dolce Vita and Amardord.

by Frank Capra (USA; 1934; 1 hr, 45 minutes)

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, staring movie legends Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, is one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history, and a film that has endured in popularity. It is considered one of the pioneering "screwball" comedies of its time, setting the pattern for many years afterwards along with another contemporary film, The Thin Man (1934). The madcap film from Columbia Studios (one of the lesser studios) was an unexpected runaway box office hit, and it garnered the top five Academy Awards (unrivaled until 1975, forty-one years later by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - and then again by The Silence of the Lambs (1991).) It won all five of its nominated categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin). When Ellie Andrews, a millionaire's daughter, marries a man her father dislikes, the resulting family squabble sends the beautiful heiress into hiding. She travels across country by bus, a fugitive from high society. En route, she meets the man of her dreams: a sexy but brusque news correspondent who has just lost his job -- which unknown to Ellie, he hopes to recover by selling her story to his former boss. Together, Peter and Ellie have a series of hapless adventures and comic misunderstandings, leading them to the realization that they were made for each other.

by Alain Tanner (Switzerland; 1976; 1 hr, 50 minutes)

Tanner describes JONAH... as "a dramatic tragicomedy in political science fiction." This rich concoction of color and black and white, songs, skits, economics, dreams, sidebars, speeches and sexual experimentation tells the story of eight veterans of 1968, stranded between revolution and accommodation, whose paths briefly cross in search of a common purpose. It ranks as one of the most important films of the disoriented 'Seventies. As a metaphor for the changing political climate in Europe in the late 60's, JONAH... is a story of a former political activist and his contemporaries learning to live with the materialism of their age. Max's involvement with a real estate deal, as well as Madeline's interest in Hinduism -- in order to expand her sexual horizons -- are a clear indication of the shift in modern thinking -- from the idealistic to the practical. more >