'The Kid' kicks off season of brilliant films
that changed cinema

When Joseph Boles and Paul Helford sat down to discuss what movies they would screen in NAU's College of Arts and Letter's 2007-08 film series, they asked themselves: What 20th century films were so significant in their choice of topic, technical advancement or innovative storylines that all films that followed would be forever changed?

What emerged was a fantastic list of titles and this year's theme: "Movies That Changed the Movies."

Boles, senior advisor to the dean of the College of Arts and Letters and series director, and Helford, a senior lecturer in the School of Communication, will host a 32-week retrospective of classic films that changed the look of cinema, 1920-1990.

Orson Welles, left, and his collaborative troupe of screenwriters, cinematgraphers and editors, along with a fantastic cast of leading players, managed to invent a whole new cinematic vocabulary through Citizen Kane, featured in this fall's Classic Film Series.

Over the year, look for well-known titles like Citizen Kane, A Streetcar Named Desire and Gone with the Wind; fantasy classics such as The Wizard of Oz, The Cat People and Snow White; classy dramas like Grand Hotel and Cabaret; silent movies like The Kid and Safety Last!; Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, Rope and Psycho; political thrillers such as Z and the original Manchurian Candidate; gangster epics such as The Public Enemy, Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather; post-WWII themed works such as The Best Years of Our Lives and The Third Man; Cold War parables such as High Noon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Seventh Seal, The Defiant Ones, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Rebel Without a Cause; Sixties social documents such as Easy Rider, Breathless and 2001; and more current work such as Manhattan and Do the Right Thing.

Films are free and open to the public and held at 7 p.m. Tuesday nights in the Cline Library Assembly Hall.

The series in the fall will look at how those films, by their emphasis on questions of identity and ethical choice and by their aesthetic innovations, transformed the reception of motion pictures in culture.

The spring series will provide a closer look at the stars, the directors and the cinematographers who helped turn an innocent form of entertainment into film art.

A special program with NAU's Martin Springer Institute will examine the role of sports during the Holocaust with a screening of Olympia2, a film by Leni Riefenstahl about the athletes at the 1936 Olympics.

Helford and Boles will deliver brief lectures about the films before the screenings and conduct Q&A sessions following.

Each screening is preceded by trivia and back story for the evening's film and accompanied by music relevant to the film's composer or era.

"Be sure to show by 7 p.m. to be included in the weekly door-prize drawings from my store of movie memorabilia," Boles advises. "We also provide, as much as possible, free 'movie candy,' current favorites being Necco wafers and Twizzlers."

For information call (928) 523-9515 or visit http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/boles/fall2007.doc.