Hello Movie Lovers,

Nearly 20 years ago, during July, 1989, I had a seminal moviegoing experience in Chicago’s Lincoln Park: a screening of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven projected on a giant screen with six-channel Dolby Stereo sound. The screening was part of a weekend called “Cinema Borealis,” three nights of free movies shown outdoors near Chicago’s lakefront that also included 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kurosawa’s Ran. The whole project was the brainchild of a Chicago projectionist/movie guru named (no kidding) James Bond, and it was Bond’s innovation to show these movies on film, as opposed to video, which allowed for a brightness and clarity and massiveness of image that was positively hypnotic for me and the thousands that gathered to watch Malick’s masterpiece when the sun went down.

While there have been huge advancements in video and digital projection in the decades since the days of Cinema Borealis, there still is nothing to match the purity and beauty of 35mm film. Inspired by Bond’s gift to Chicago and with the initiative of Chris Jones and the Business Association of the South Wedge Area, George Eastman House will present five nights of free screenings under the stars on a 45 foot screen in the Highland Park Bowl, with state-of-the-art 35mm projection and stereo sound provided by the talented folks at Boston Light & Sound.

 

The films selected for screening are all acknowledged classics of American cinema and they were chosen primarily for their ability to transfix and entertain an audience, but also for their visual splendor, qualities which will be enhanced by the enormity of this cinema-under-the-stars. There are no other films that have captured the awe-inspiring element of space travel like Kubrick’s 2001 (screening Tuesday, Aug. 26), and are there images of New York City more iconic than the ones captured in black-and-white widescreen by cinematographer Gordon Willis in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (Wednesday, Aug. 27)? Even if you’ve seen the films before, you won’t want to miss the spectacle of Cary Grant clinging to Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (Thursday, Aug. 28) or the glistening cars cruising Modesto, California in American Graffiti (Friday, Aug. 29) when they’re projected like this. The double dose of Boris Karloff horror (Saturday, Aug. 30) that closes the series will reveal that Karloff truly was a talent to be reckoned with and the set designers of the 30s at Universal Pictures were no slouches either!

The tradition of the open-air screening is a common one outside of North America, unless we consider the legacy of the Drive-in, and it’s a special experience that I think you will treasure.

See you in the Highland Park Bowl!

Click here to visit the Dryden Theatre website for more information.

My mind is wandering as I am traveling across the country, thinking about how easy it is. I know we get upset about airline glitches, but really: What a time we are living. And what interesting crossroads we face. New choices every day. Choices about how we structure our lives, from play to products; wonderful opportunities, different challenges. Our students know better than most how the past streams behind us, whizzing away. And in its wake: We struggle to live in the present, if even we think about it, likely creating lives with assumptions closer to Newton’s than to even Einstein’s. Products are obsolete before they wear out. Repairs are a thing of the past. We discard our records, delete our email, never print out images, and trash our environment – both material and virtual. We discard our history and threaten our future. And to make matters worse, we know that during the past 25 years we have nurtured a chronic, civic amnesia. An entire generation – likely now two – have tossed away a good bit of their history.

Now more than ten years ago, Terry Faulkner, one of the architects of Eastman Kodak Company’s remarkable transformation from analog into digital, described the change from traditional photography into a new media as a “disruptive technology substitution.” By that he meant that things would no longer be the same. Pictures would look different; they would be made differently, and they would be taken differently. “New business models will be required,” he reasoned, “and there will be a major shakeout” – not only in the photography business, but also with all those who use digital technologies in any way.

Picture making and distribution really has changed. Where once one took and then processed and created a picture and only then distributed it to loved ones and friends or to other media, photographers now open their shutter upon a scene and send the signal to their family or to their magazine, without reviewing a print: Distribute right now, then print.

Similarly, digital technologies have influenced such basic strategies as problem solving. Where once one was advised to previsualize the means toward an outcome, one now need not imagine the outcome before beginning a process. Solutions, like a networked application, are discovered by swarming through several solutions toward an outcome, testing these trials as they are created:

Networked, not point to point. New tools. New responses. Different systems. New architectures for virtual priorities. Interesting crossroads. The plane is landing.