"Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words."
The Queens College Film Society was formed as another club like any other and had a decent budget, but unfortunately the President surreptitiously used all of it to fund his film. Left without money, the Vice-President asked me to bring in films I had on laserdisc and we would screen them in Keily Hall. The idea was that we would have the screening and then a discussion about the film itself. It was a neat idea, and it sort of worked. The discussions were always really cool, and I even managed to prevail upon Royal S. Brown to come down and give a talk about Romeo is Bleeding. Different people would come down for different films. The largest audience we had was for Do the Right Thing, which, as one might imagine, also spawned the liveliest discussion. We also did Apocalypse Now, Hate and a few others. The Vice President even managed to swing a 16 millimeter print of Pink Floyd: The Wall, which was cool.
Welcome to Alphaville
Jean Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution was the original future noir, a blend of pulp and philosophy. I've mentioned this film before, and while sifting through some old stuff, I found this column which was part of a series I had done as a favor to the Vice-President. He really didn't have much to promote the films, as there was no money, so I would make fliers on weekends at Tower on the photocopy machine. I had access to video boxes and laserdiscs for artwork, and the Merlin machine (a precursor to the Brother P-Touch) for captions. He had approached the Queens College Quad (now called The Knight News) for coverage, but they couldn't spare anybody, so he asked if I would write a piece about each week's screening. I produced a few of these columns, some others of which must be around somewhere.
Trailer