Spring Quarter 2008 Statement
by FVC Director Lauren Steimer

We begin this quarter with Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a film nominated for 2 academy awards as well as the Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Hitchcock had the good fortune of working with an astonishingly talented team of actors: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. The outstanding performances in this film are amplified by Hitchcock’s complex cinematographic style. This is an event not to be missed.

Notorious will be preceded by Christine Kim’s short film Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled is being shown as part of the UCI Filmmaker’s Series. This is the second quarter in which the FVC will host this series, the purpose of which is to showcases the best work of UCI students and alumni. This quarter we will screen seven films as part of the UCI Filmmakers Series, all of these films will be screened before selected screenings and have been paired with the feature for that evening because of similarities in content, genre, or style.

This marks the tenth year that the Film and Video Center will host the Latin American Film Festival. This year the festival will run for two consecutive weeks, for a total of eight evenings of screenings. Each year the Festival brings independent masterpieces and rarely screened treasures from Latin America to the UCI community. This year we would like to thank Michael P. Harrison and all of the LAFF volunteers for all of the time and effort that they put into programming this year’s festival. The FVC would also like to thank the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as the Latin American Studies Department for sponsoring the LAFF.

The FVC will be screening Medium Cool in connection with “The Future of the Sixties: Radicalism, Reform, Reaction” conference that is sponsored by the Humanities Center. The FVC wishes to extend our deepest gratitude to Professor Catherine Liu for planning this event as well as to Professor Jon Wiener, our distinguished speaker.

The FVC will be screening Spider-Man 2 on Thursday, May 8 in conjunction with a special pre-screening discussion with Marvel comic book legend Stan Lee. The FVC would like to thank Mr. Lee as well as Visiting Assistant Professor Matt Yockey for their assistance in planning this event.

Much of the programming for this quarter was inspired by the anniversary of the May 1968 student rebellions in France. These youth-led public protests that called for political and economic change, though largely unsuccessful in terms of their immediate goals, had a lasting social impact on France. The May ’68 protests mark a moment in the late 1960s when young people, unsure and disturbed about the plans that their parents and governments had for their future, rebelled against the establishment and called for regime change. It is on the fortieth anniversary of the events of May ’68 and in the spirit of ‘youth’, ‘change’, and ‘rebellion’ that we have programmed a series on French Cinema in the 1960s as well as a New Hollywood series.

I, like Hitchcock, have the good fortune of working with an extremely talented and dedicated team of people. I wish to thank our volunteers without whom the FVC could not exist: Anabela Kim, Nathaniel Pope, Liliana Rodriquez, Soken Sai, Justin Paul Molina, Amanda Mellor, Cristina Ibarra, Jeffrey Ahn, Gina Chun, Matt Ward and Kristen Sales. I would also like to thank our student assistant Jessica Lee, intern Lani Kim and our Interim Assistant Director, Andrea Bink who made it possible for the FVC to continue running from Winter to Spring. I would also like to thank our student assistant Jessica Lee and our Interim Assistant Director, Andrea Bink who made it possible for the FVC to continue running from Winter to Spring. I would in particular like to thank Andrea for finding what seems to be the only 35mm print of The Graduate in the country. Film prints are only beautiful in the hand of a gifted technician, the FVC is forever grateful to have projection-artist Tony Bandiera on our side. Last, but certainly not least, the FVC would like to thank Kimberly Yaari, who deftly balanced the needs of a newborn baby with the needs of the Film and Video Center.

—Lauren Steimer, Director

Lauren Steimer is a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Media Studies. She was awarded Outstanding Professor of the Year in the School of Humanities for 2007 by the graduating class. Her areas of specialization are Hong Kong Action Cinema, Film Exhibition History, Labor, and the Body. She teaches classes on Hitchcock, The Musical, Moving Image Pornography, and New Hollywood Cinema.