Now that the Milwaukee Film Festival is in hibernation for another season, I’m on the prowl for film activities to keep me celluloid saturated week to week. Luckily, within 48 hours of the film fest’s end, I received an e-mail about this Sunday’s Cinema Club meeting! The Cinema Club is one of the Milwaukee film scene’s best-kept secrets — surprise 10 a.m. screenings of films that often don’t play Milwaukee again — and if they do, sometimes not for months. Audiences arrive with no prior knowledge of what they’ll see. Will it be a bipolar romance? A coming-of-age story? A horror flick? Who will be the guest speaker? One never knows, which makes it part of the fun.
“Spending a Sunday morning watching a film that nobody else has seen in Milwaukee is a privilege!” says UWM professor Gilberto Blasini, who, along with charismatic professor Patrice Petro, has been facilitating the screenings since they began on a cold February morning in 2007 with The Lives of Others, which went on to win the Best Foreign Language Academy Award later that year.
I asked Gilberto to sell me on the Club as if I’m a newcomer. He explained that attending preview screenings with researched introductions about the film AND intelligent discussions following turn watching a film into an event! Additionally, “A considerable number of the films selected by our programmer and current owner of the Cinema Club, Andrew Mencher, are not theatrically shown in Milwaukee,” Gilberto said, offering as examples Claude Lelouche’s Roman de Gare, Tim Disney’s American Violet, Christian Cairon’s L’affaire Farewell, Philipp Stölzl’s North Face, Jonathan Parker’s (Untitled) and Benoit Pilon’s The Necessities of Life. “In fact, some of these amazing films — like Roman de Gare and L’affaire Farewell, both of which are in my top 10 list of films that we’ve screened in the club during the past four years — have not even been released on DVD. So, Cinema Club members have had the privilege of watching films that are otherwise unavailable to filmgoers.”
Not unlike the Milwaukee Film Festival, the movies screening at the Cinema Club are culled from the international festival circuit. “Given that our programmer attends dozens of leading film festivals around the globe looking for sneak previews (for example, Andrew secured the screening of Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go while at the Toronto Film Festival in early September), our members rest assured that even if they don’t know the title of the film that they are about to watch, they will have an enriching film-going experience.”
Personally, I enjoy that the Cinema Club allows me to see films well before they are in theaters and gauge audience reactions to them. For example, Let the Right One In screened on a fall Sunday morning, and I immediately loved it. Once I started looking at the press, it was easy to see Milwaukee was missing out on a worldwide film phenomenon. The following semester, the UWM Union Theater programmed the film, but that was at least two (if not three or four) months later.
Seeing the delightful Happy-go-Lucky, Mike Leigh’s superb 2008 film, with an audience also proved absolutely fascinating. The main character inspired me: She’s funny, vibrant, motivated and peculiar. While listening to the post-screening conversation, I realized there were two very different perspectives surfacing. The women seemed enthused by the main character and talked about her as an adult woman wrestling with life choices. The men spoke of her more as a child; they seemed to be waiting for her to outgrow a phase. For as much as I love discussing films after I’ve seen them, I tend to watch movies with like-minded people, so the Cinema Club is truly the only place outside of the Milwaukee Film Festival that I hear this range of reactions. I quite like it! I don’t always agree with everyone, certainly, but I love the breadth of responses.
Gilberto’s favorite moment was their screening of Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: “I went to the film with no expectation whatsoever since I had not liked his previous films — Basquiat and Before Night Falls. Diving Bell really blew my mind for its aesthetic brilliance and cinematic smartness. The film became a revelation of cinema’s extraordinary capability to create new ways of seeing/hearing/being in the world for audiences.”
For him, “The Cinema Club has ratified … that the best film experience takes place in the darkness of a theater, projected on a large screen, in the company of a large audience.” Furthermore, “one of my favorite things about the Cinema Club is to have the opportunity to spend valuable time talking about cinema and its place in our lives with friends, colleagues and club members. As a Film Studies professor, I always want to make sure that people become aware of the power of cinema, which goes well beyond simply being a form of entertainment.”
Well put. The Cinema Club meets this Sunday, Oct. 10, at 10 a.m. at the Oriental Theater. Doors open at 9:30. A prorated membership (which includes the remaining six fall screenings) costs $85 by check or $90 by credit card. Audiences may attend just one screening, though at $20 a pop, it’s a much better deal to become a member.
Also, just between you and me, this Sunday’s screening is an acclaimed drama featuring Academy Award winners and nominees that is not set for theatrical release until December… but you didn’t hear it here!
For more information, check out their website.
