Alaska Cinema Club

Overview

The latest project of multidisciplinary artist-run initiative Alaska Projects, this cinematheque is a series of ten films curated by Dr Alex Munt of UTS. It’s an eclectic and often provocative selection, offering a range of cinematic visions of Manhattan.

The club kicks off with Spike Lee’s incendiary Do the Right Thing, about a Brooklyn community straining at the seams of racial tensions as a heatwave simmers. It builds up to an explosive climax which is still hotly debated in film schools everywhere today.

Offering a much more genteel view of the city that never sleeps is the wonderful Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s very best works, and writer-director Whit Stillman's 1992 debut, Metropolitan. The latter is a mannered, impeccable look at the indolent younger generation of the “urban haute bourgeoisie”.

There’s also two of the most controversial films about the big Apple ever made, the brutal satire of American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis’s infamous, career-making novel and the Larry Clark-directed sex and drugs dirge Kids. Based on a screenplay by a then teenaged Harmony Korine, the impact of Kids was sensational and divisive — many wanted it banned, but it had its strong supporters, including Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, who championed the film as “daringly original, touching and alive”.

Each film will be introduced a guest speaker and the first screening sees Alex Munt in conversation with Alaska Projects curator Sebastian Goldspink. Films screen at Alaska Projects, barring May 6 and November 6, which are both at UTS in the Bon Marche Studio.

Here's the schedule:

May 6: Do the Right Thing (1989) @ UTS
May 18: David Holzman's Diary (1967) @ Alaska
June 15: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) @ Alaska
July 6: Ms 45 (1981) @ Alaska
August 10: The Warriors (1979) @ Alaska
September 14: Liquid Sky (1982) @ Alaska
November 6: Metropolitan (1990) @ UTS
November 16: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) @ Alaska
December 14: American Psycho (2000) @ Alaska