The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection Outdoor Film Series

All films will begin at 7:30 pm and will held on the Chapel Lawn

In case of inclement weather, screenings will be held indoors in Taylor, room 203

March 27, 2008 - Double Feature
Freaks (1932)

A traveling carnival’s beautiful trapeze artist seduces and marries the midget leader of the sideshow performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him to steal his inheritance. Freaks explores the dynamics of inclusive social groups and tells the age-old moral that exterior and interior beauty are not always aligned. The film is also notable for its casting of actor with real deformities, rather than using makeup and effects.
Directed by Tod Browning

Un chien andalou (1929)

Buñuel’s famous surrealist short substitutes a conventional plot for a series of expressionistic images. Following Freudian “dream logic,” Un Chien Andalou aims to shock and amaze its viewers with a mix of erotic, puzzling, and disturbing visions. Buñuel and Dalí had one rule in writing the film: "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted."
Directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

April 3, 2008 - Eyes Without a Face (1959)

Eyes Without a Face is a French horror film about a girl who loses most of her face in an accident and her obsessive father who seeks to restore her physical beauty. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, it features a mad scientist who tries to reign over nature, ultimately failing, and here at the hand of his creation. The film has had a lasting influence, even on American films such as John Carpenter’s Halloween and John Woo’s Face/Off.
Directed by George Franju

April 10, 2008 - Seconds (1966)

A man bored with his job and marriage is invited to join a secret organization, known only as The Company, faking his death and providing him with a new identity (and a new actor). While he is originally excited by his new job, friends, and renewed youth, he comes to desire his old life but discovers too late this request to The Company will more than terminate his employment. Seconds uses the human body as a metaphor for capitalist commodities, exchangeable and disposable in the forward motion of the film’s sinister corporation.
Directed by John Frankenheimer

April 17, 2008 - Pumping Iron (1977)

Pumping Iron is a documentary following three bodybuilders (famously featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger) in preparation for the 1975 Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe competitions. Considered the definitive documentary on bodybuilding, the film considers both the physical transformation and maintenance of these competitive bodies and the politics and psychological aspects of the sport.
Directed by Robert Fiore

April 24, 2008 - Altered States (1980)

Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is a university scientist obsessed with discovering the origin and meaning of life through direct experience, in contrast to his struggles with the mundane nature of daily life. Jessup begins experimenting with sensory-deprivation experiments using a floatation tank, and travels to Mexico to participate in a ceremony using psychotropic mushrooms with resulting bizarre imagery. Jessup combines his experimentation of sensory deprivation with the mushrooms and undergoes a series of transformations, experiencing biological devolution. Declining from a Neanderthal-like humanoid, to a giant amoeba, and finally into a swirling, primordial mass, only to be rescued by his wife and restored to his humanity.
Directed by Ken Russell

May 1, 2008 - The Thing (1982)

An Antarctic research station is infiltrated by an alien creature with the ability to perfectly imitate any organic life form that it physically contacts. The crew of the station comes to distrust each other, as they cannot discern who is human and who is not. This results in many deaths, either by members being transformed into the creature or by each other. Though mostly a genre film on the surface, The Thing thematically contemplates the defining characters of humanity and questions whether we will be our own apocalyptic downfall.
Directed by John Carpenter

May 8, 2008 - The Fly (1986)

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a genius, albeit fringe, scientist developing unprecedented work in teleportation. His enthusiasm for the project leads him to experiment on himself prematurely, with disastrous results. As Brundle mutates into a human-fly hybrid, Cronenberg both stuns his audience with his horrific vision of hybridization between man and insect and instills an age-old moral.
Directed by David Cronenberg

May 15, 2008 - Dead Ringers (1988)

In Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons stars in a dual role of identical twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle. The Mantles are successful gynecologists, sharing a practice and dividing the tasks of progress and research (performed by the more introverted Elliot) and their public face (easily maintained by suave Beverly). The twins enter a downward spiral after first competing over the same woman and subsequent drug addictions. Through the setting of medicine and the ideal subjects of identical twins, Dead Ringers explore the physical, emotional, and psychological connections between those who share identical DNA.
Directed by David Cronenberg

May 22, 2008 - Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Silence of the Lambs portrays the relationship of two now-iconic characters, famous psychiatrist and serial killer Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) and FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), as they unconventionally work together to find another killer, Buffalo Bill. Violence, both committed by the human body and upon it, is central in not only the murders, but in the depictions of cannibalism and the artwork of Buffalo Bill, who uses the flesh of his victims for a surprising purpose.
Directed by Jonathan Demme

May 29, 2008 - Being John Malkovich (1999)

Protagonist Craig Swartz (John Cusack) is an unsuccessful puppeteer whose life enters the fantastic when his wife forces him to get a job as a file clerk. Instantly unusual, his employer Lestercorp’s is located on the 7 ½th floor of its building. Stranger yet, one of its doors is a portal into the body of actor John Malkovich. A strange love triangle emerges between Craig and his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), both interested in Craig’s co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) and both pursuing her from the body of John Malkovich. As the film’s tagline (“ever wanted to be someone else?”) suggests, Being John Malkovich explores identity, appearance, and individuality.
Directed by Spike Jonze

June 5, 2008 - Talk to Her (2002)

Talk to Her tells the interwoven stories of two comatose women and the men that love them. Using a nonlinear narrative, Almodóvar shows how these characters have come to know each other, how each of the women fell comatose, and their respective fates. Thematically focused on the difficultly of communication between the sexes, infidelity, and loneliness, the film’s originality springs from its combination of traditional storytelling and bizarre dreamscapes.
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar