"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" screens on July 7 at 7 p.m.
UW Cinematheque, known for highlighting great films, is about to also shine a light on great writing. Programmers have designed a four-film series around retired UW film professor David Bordwell’s new book, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. The screenings — to be held Thursday evenings in July — and book focus on four early critics, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler, whose dynamic and groundbreaking prose shaped decades of film criticism.
Jim Healy, Cinematheque’s director of programming, calls Bordwell’s book a standout even among his large canon of existing work. “What I think it does different from his other books is it really celebrates writing,” Healy says. “[Bordwell] does it by appreciating and sampling each of these four different stylists and how they wrote about film. What comes through is his own joy of reading these guys and sharing their work.”
Healy says he and Bordwell collaborated to choose four exceptional films that will accompany a review or piece of prose written by one of the four critics. The opening film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is one of the more familiar selections. But the series will also screen lesser-known films, including Counter-Attack, which Healy learned of through Bordwell’s introduction. “It’s a real discovery. A remarkable film,” Healy says. “It’s a very intense picture with suspense and action. It deserves to be more widely seen and known.”
Bordwell will give a 45-minute mini-lecture before the first film, but plans to attend each screening. “Each of these critics were very positive about the potential of film,” says Bordwell. “They thought film was a very important art form, so when they saw something they thought was valuable, they would boost it.” He points out that each critic was a “swashbuckler” in his own right, wielding unique prose that helped to craft and shape a fledgling film industry.
“One of the things that attracted me to them is that they are all such amazing writers,” Bordwell says. “They are doing things with language that are very much part of the American tradition, just like Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain. There are lessons here for how to write to grab the reader.”
Bordwell’s talk will accompany The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on July 7 at 7 p.m. For more information about the series, visit cinema.wisc.edu.