Tag: Film

  • Nation & World

    Cinematic reverberations

    The writing of culture watcher and critic Louis Menand — Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English — has cast a wide net over the years.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gates’ ‘Lives 2’ receives Parents’ Choice Award

    Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS documentary “African American Lives 2” has won the Parents’ Choice Gold Award for Television, awarded last month by the Parents’ Choice Foundation.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Religious diversity explored at local level

    Can a diverse religious community unite and heal after a brutal murder in broad daylight, one possibly motivated by religious hatred? That profound question and others like it, questions of religious diversity and tolerance, are at the heart of the new documentary “Fremont, U.S.A.,” which was developed by Harvard’s Pluralism Project and screened last Thursday…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    James Franco well-done at Hasty roast

    On the most superstitious day of the year, James Franco got lucky. With his roguish grin and trademark James Dean looks, the actor appeared stunned but happy during his Friday the 13th roast as Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Man of the Year, rubbing his Pudding Pot and declaring, “Now I’ve made it.”

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    VES film features city on the move

    Maxim Pozdorovkin and Joe Bender, graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, respectively, have captured Kazakhstan’s dramatic emergence in a documentary film titled “Capital.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Zellweger adds Hasty Pudding Pot to trophy shelf

    Academy Award-winning actress Renée Zellweger proves she is worthy of the shiny Pudding Pot that comes with being named the Woman of the Year by the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Rubén Blades donates papers, recordings

    He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for president of his native Panama and served as the Panamanian minister of tourism, but now Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 will add another credit to his resume: Harvard College Library benefactor.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched

    A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Innovative filmmaking marks VES program

    An intimate relationship between the residents of Harbin city in northeastern China and their mother river, the Songhua. A revealing insight into the personal struggles and national identity of Sudanese potters on the banks of the White Nile. These are the subjects of two ethnographic films premiering Feb. 11 at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bridget Jones is on campus, James Dean on his way

    “You had me at ‘Renée!?????” Renée Zellweger and James Franco have been chosen as the 2009 Hasty Pudding Woman and Man of the Year.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scholar asks: ‘How can we know the spectator from the dance?’

    When Yvonne Rainer and her fellow dancers took to the stage in the early 1960s, their performances were like nothing American audiences had ever seen. First, there were no costumes. Performers wore T-shirts, casual pants, and sneakers. In place of elaborate leaps and twirls, the dancers engaged in everyday movements like running, climbing, and even…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Godot’ in the bayou: Artist Chan speaks at Carpenter Center

    Paul Chan is soft-spoken, but his words are heavy. Carefully chosen, they offer an insight into his reflective process and the weighty implications of his work.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gore: Universities have important role in sustainability

    Former vice president Al Gore ’69 addressed a crowd of 15,000 in chilly, leaf-strewn Tercentenary Theatre Oct. 22, 2008, delivering the keynote address in a multi-day celebration of the University’s commitment to sustainability.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Students watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

    It’s “an inconvenient truth,” but only about 25 people showed up for a Harvard screening Sunday (Oct. 19) of a film by the same name, which earned former Vice President Al Gore ’69 both an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Du Bois fellow makes ‘Little Fugitive,’ take two

    The wonder of Brooklyn’s iconic amusement park Coney Island as seen through the eyes of a young runaway is at the heart of the 1953 classic film “Little Fugitive” by the directing team of Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin. What lies at the heart of Joanna Lipper’s ’94 recent remake is much darker.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Picture Perfect

    We live in a world flooded with images. There has been an explosion of cell phone cameras, social networking sites, digital photography, blogs, and surveillance cameras, and we have a 24-hour news cycle that feeds on pictures.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ken Burns to headline Theodore Roosevelt celebration

    Theodore Roosevelt is considered a principal architect of the U.S. national park system. To help mark his 150th birthday this fall, noted filmmaker Ken Burns will come to Harvard to offer remarks and show clips from his upcoming documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” due out in fall 2009. Scheduled for Oct. 3 at…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gates documentary series receives $12M in funding

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently announced funding in the amount of $12 million for three, new public television documentary series in which Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. will explore the meaning of race, culture, and identity in America.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gates documentary series receives $12M in funding

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently announced funding in the amount of $12 million for three, new public television documentary series in which Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. will explore the meaning of race, culture, and identity in America. Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lens on politics: Life in Serbia, Kosovo

    Impulse, activism, and perhaps a bit of naiveté. That’s what led Jeff Silva, a teaching assistant in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, to make his way to war-torn Belgrade just days after the NATO bombing campaign ended in June of 1999.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bollywood under a lens

    Richard Delacy, preceptor in Sanskrit and Indian studies, flicks off the lights in his classroom and cues the video projector. A few students shift in their seats as the opening credits for “Khalnayak,” a renowned Bollywood film, roll across the screen.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Iraqi film series offers rare glimpse into bleak world

    Beginning today through Saturday (April 17-19), the Tsai Auditorium at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) will host selections from the first international Iraq Short Film Festival (originally held in Baghdad in 2005).

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The perils of historical fiction

    Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of the celebrated “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard last week (April 9-11).

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Film insists U.S. educational system is in critical condition

    Last month Bill Gates warned Congress that the United States is dangerously close to losing its competitive edge due to a serious shortage of scientists and engineers. The problem required in part, said the Microsoft founder, a revamping of the country’s educational system.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Filmmaker literally deconstructs classic, avant-garde movies

    For filmmakers, the visual image is vital. But movie producer Rebecca Baron is more interested in what you can’t see.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard graduate student takes good cause and good friend on the road

    What’s a 15-year-old boy, confined to a wheelchair with a fatal form of muscular dystrophy, to do on his summer vacation? Take a 7,000-mile road trip across the country with 11 friends. So thought Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) student Logan Smalley Ed.M. ’08, who organized the trek and then captured it in his…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Black Students Association honors pair for activism, service

    The Harvard Black Students Association honored Robert Lewis Jr., vice president for program at the Boston Foundation, and critically acclaimed actress Gabrielle Union with its Crimson and Black Leadership awards on Feb. 29. Crimson and Black is an annual event at the University designed to showcase the achievements of Harvard’s past black students while addressing…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Goodfellow Liotta visits University

    Film actor Ray Liotta recently (Feb. 25) visited the Harvard Foundation as a special guest. He met with representatives of several student cultural organizations, including the Harvard Italian-American Cultural Society.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    New Ph.D. film program launched

    The study of moving images has always been viewed through a wide lens at Harvard. Since the beginning, film studies at the University has sought to incorporate a broad range of disciplines in order to appreciate and understand the visual experience. The rich fields of philosophy, psychology, and the fine arts were all mined early…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Exploring the shadows

    “If you wouldn’t tell Stalin, don’t tell anyone else!” In the early years of the Cold War, a billboard near an atomic bomb testing site in New Mexico urged passersby to keep research developments close to the vest. Secrecy was of the utmost importance in that era — and not just in scientific circles —…

    5 minutes