"A Century of War" Film Festival
All films will be shown at 7 p.m. at the Strand Theatre, 921 Main Street, Grinnell, Iowa.
These showings are free and open to the public. Complimentary refreshments will be provided.
Monday, February 9 – Afghanistan: The Surge
Robert Hodierne ’68, director/producer, will answer questions after the show.
“Afghanistan: The Surge” tells the story of one Marine platoon sent to Afghanistan in the summer of 2010 as part of President Obama’s surge. The platoon, filled with skilled and highly trained Marines with the best of intentions, was sent to a remote outpost to eliminate the Taliban. It didn’t always work out that way. The film reveals why the war in Afghanistan was so frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful. The documentary was screened at the Washington West Film Festival and took top honors for large market television from Military Reporters and Editors.
116 minutes.
Robert Hodierne began his 40-year journalism career as a freelance photographer covering the Vietnam War in 1966. Since then Hodierne has worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers, wire services, magazines, television, radio, and the Internet. In 1981 he was part of a team that won most American journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize. He is currently chairman of the journalism department at the University of Richmond, where his teaching emphasis on documentary film. He is a 1968 graduate of Grinnell College.
Tuesday, February 10 – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
In 1920, one brilliant movie jolted the postwar masses and catapulted the movement known as German Expressionism into film history. That movie was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a plunge into the mind of insanity that severs all ties with the rational world. Director Robert Wiene and a visionary team of designers crafted a nightmare realm in which light, shadow, and substance are abstracted, a world in which a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community.
75 minutes.
Wednesday, February 11 – Nosferatu
A cornerstone of the horror film, F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR is resurrected in an HD edition mastered from the acclaimed 35mm restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. Backed by an orchestral performance of Hans Erdmann’s 1922 score, this edition offers unprecedented visual clarity and historical faithfulness to the original release version. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, NOSFERATU remains to many viewers the most unsettling vampire film ever made, and its bald, spidery vampire, personified by the diabolical Max Schreck, continues to spawn imitations in the realm of contemporary cinema.
95 minutes.
Thursday, February 12 – All Quiet on the Western Front
One of the most powerful anti-war statements ever put on film, this gut-wrenching story concerns a group of friends who join the Army during World War I and are assigned to the Western Front, where their fiery patriotism is quickly turned to horror and misery by the harsh realities of combat. Director Lewis Milestone pioneered the use of the sweeping crane shot to capture a ghastly battlefield panorama of death and mud, and the cast, led by Lew Ayres, is terrific.
140 minutes.