Calendar: Thursday (2nd Show)

Cinemasaurus!

The Greatest Series in the Prehistory of Doc.

The magic of dinosaurs, nearly as much as cinema itself, has managed to capture the collective imagination of the modern era. There is much one can say, both affectionately and critically, about this cultural fascination. It shaped our childhoods, yet somehow stuck with us long after ponies, dump trucks and other playpen obsessions were relegated to the realms of memory, dream and nightmare. Rather than get too heady, we hope through Cinemasaurus! to embark on a journey exploring what results from those blessed creations where dinosaurs and celluloid meet. Suspense, fantasy, delightful camp, and a great deal of technological innovation are all encompassed in this series, which traces the great contributions of terrible lizards to cinema, beginning with silent films made shortly after the medium’s conception and reaching a climax in the blockbuster age with Jurassic Park. more

Early films such as the original King Kong (4/10), Three Ages and Gertie the Dinosaur (4/24), and The Lost World and The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (5/15), carved out a space for dinosaurs while cinema’s main genres were still in gestation. These films left lasting marks on the development not only of dinosaur films, but of film in general. Three Ages, which at one point features Buster Keaton riding a dinosaur, was the beginning of Keaton’s long and influential career in feature films. The early special-effects masters like Willis O’Brien and Winsor McCay ushered in new techniques in animation, inspiring young filmmakers like Walt Disney to pursue their craft.

Films like the animated children’s classic The Land Before Time (4/3) provide an easy opportunity for college age audiences to reconnect their dino-affections, perhaps long tucked away. It will screen with another animated film, Mountain of Dinosaurs, a Soviet short about how dinosaurs fall in love and why states need to give their citizens room to strike their own paths in life, accepting the danger inherent therein (referring both to dino-love and individual liberty!).

The lone entry from the 1940s is One Million B.C. (5/1), which became the high water mark for prehistoric movies for most of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Its success was both a blessing and a curse for dinosaur cinema. While it inspired a wave of new dinosaur movies, many of these often ultra-low-budget productions were content with recycling stock footage from the film rather than creating their own, a practice that persisted as late as the 1970s. A classic example is Robot Monster (4/17), a legendary B-movie once savaged by “Mystery Science Theater 3000” that now sits next to Ed Wood’s filmography in the canon of awful cinema.

More traditional (and more competent) sci-fi monster films make up the bulk of dinosaur cinema. They are represented here by 20 Million Miles to Earth (5/8), where Ray Harryhausen’s fantastical creature design finally combines the two most loved categories of beings in sci-fi - dinosaurs and aliens; The Land Unknown (5/22), whose fast pace makes up for its low budget; and finally Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (5/29), just one representative of the very popular genre of monster movies in Japan. While often starting out from similar premises, these dinoriffic films are diverse in their wide range of settings in time, place, and culture.

Jurassic Park (6/5) crowns both the series and the sci-fi monster movie genre itself, taking it to new technological heights with its high-budget robotic dinos, as well as to new philosophical depths - the premise of Man fighting some amazing yet dangerous incarnation of Nature, so typical in the genre, is complicated by the horrific reality that through science, humanity has created the very beings which threaten it. The University of Chicago’s own world-renowned paleontologist, Dr. Paul Sereno, will present our screening of Jurassic Park with a brief lecture before the film and will field questions from the audience. In this evening, we hope to conclude the series in a manner that provides insight into many of the issues the films repeatedly raise: the tenuous connection between paleontological science and both dinomania and dinosaur cinema, the development and seemingly near perfection of technologies to portray “realistic” dinosaurs on screen, and the widely varying ways in which dinosaurs have become symbolic backdrops for the manifestation of a jumbled litany of philosophical, social, and political issues.

We may never be able to fully comprehend the eternal appeal of dinosaurs. Yet perhaps through art we can come the closest, like in this moving poem by second grader Meagan V.:

Dinosaurs are great,
Dinosaurs are good
I wish they where still alive,
So I could play with them late
Every day and if I really had one
I would take her to the mall and
Take her to the Barbershop
and have a haircut.

EC & AG close

The Land Before Time
Don Bluth, 1988 - 80 min.

Rousing adventure and hilarious hijinks await as Littlefoot the Apatosaurus, freshly orphaned thanks to the stubby arms and wrath of the evil T-Rex Sharptooth, journeys to The Great Valley to escape a desecrated landscape. He meets Cera the Triceratops, Ducky the Saurolophus, Petrie the Pteranodon and Spike the Stegosaurus! The Land Before Time is a landmark children’s film, spawning a number of beloved direct-to-video sequels and capturing the hearts and minds of paleo-centric children across the world. Set to a pulse pounding score, it’s dino-mite! Preceded by a Soviet short, Mountain of Dinosaurs. 35mm.

King Kong
Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933 - 104 min.

Intrepid filmmaker Carl Denham takes his cast and crew to the remote Skull Island. Star Jack Driscoll’s love for the starlet, Ann Darrow, is established early on, but Driscoll soon finds he’s not alone in his feelings. The island’s natives worship a giant gorilla, and capture the starlet as an offering. While Driscoll and the others venture to save her, King Kong battles with the scaly, prehistoric foes. Darrow is rescued from Kong, but the ape has developed a love for her that brings the story to its sky-high climax. King Kong is engrossing, and a beautiful example of early stop-motion animation. 16mm.

Robot Monster
Phil Tucker, 1953 - 73 min.

With a budget of $16,000, an actor-friend with a gorilla costume and a diving mask, and plundered footage from One Million B.C., director Phil Tucker set out to make his masterpiece, a sci-fi film that addressed atomic age anxieties through the figure of Ro-Man XJ2, the alien invader who threatens the last surviving Hu-mans with a cosmic ray “from which will spring prehistoric reptiles to devour whatever remains of life!” When critics scorned this impossibly earnest film, Tucker attempted suicide, found unconscious in the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. Preceded by a short, Adam Raises Cain. 16mm.

Three Ages
Buster Keaton, 1923 - 75 min.

Admittedly, dinosaurs appear only in a small portion of Buster Keaton’s feature-length debut as a director. Yet that small portion involves Keaton riding a dinosaur, which is worth the price of admission alone. A parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, the film depicts Keaton in love with Margaret Leahy in three different time periods – the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and Roaring Twenties America. The film will be preceded by Winsor McCay’s short Gertie the Dinosaur, one of the most highly regarded and important of all animated films, giant reptiles or not. 16mm.
Accompanied by pianist Daniel Sefik.

One Million B.C.
Hal Roach, 1940 - 80 min.

Hal Roach’s epic tale of caveman warfare became the definitive dinosaur film for decades. Tumak (Victor Mature), the son of the brutal leader of the Rock Tribe (Lon Chaney, Jr.), falls in love with Loana (Carole Landis), a woman from the kinder, gentler Shell Tribe. While Tumak struggles to be accepted by the Shells, both tribes must battle with each other – and, of course, with dinosaurs. D.W. Griffith is rumored to have directed portions of the movie, though this remains in dispute. Stock footage of the Oscar-nominated effects were recycled as late as the ‘70s. Archival 35mm.
Print courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive.

20 Million Miles to Earth
Nathan Juran, 1957 - 82 min.

It’s remarkable that it took nearly 70 years of dinosaur cinema for someone to realize the possibility of combining dinosaurs with aliens. Ray Harryhausen, perhaps film’s greatest creature designer, finally filled this hole with the Ymir, a T-Rexlike creature brought over from Venus to Sicily by an American spaceship. The Ymir grows in size, wreaking havoc through Italy, ultimately resulting in a showdown in the Coliseum. The monster is much more sympathetic than one typically found in creature features of the period, thanks largely to the wonderfully expressive humanoid features Harryhausen animates onto the Ymir. 35mm.

The Lost World
Harry O. Hoyt, 1925 - 105 min.

This classic follows Professor Challenger, explorer extraordinaire, and London newspaperman Edward Malone in a mission to rescue Challenger’s lost partner Maple White in Amazonia. Both Challenger and White’s daughter’s diary claim that dinosaurs survive in this isolated region, but the party is still shocked to find the claim validated! Dino fights, impossible love, and dino city rampages all follow, laying the groundwork for many dinosaur films that followed. Preceded by a short, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link. 35mm.
Accompanied by pianist Daniel Sefik. Print courtesy of George Eastman House.

The Land Unknown
Virgil W. Vogel, 1957 - 78 min.

Hal and Jack (Jock Mahoney and William Reynolds) lead a Navy expedition to the Antarctic, along with their helicopter pilot (Phil Harvey) and Maggie, a reporter they all not-so-secretly desire (Shawn Smith). Beneath the ice, they discover, naturally, a tropical jungle filled with dinosaurs and man-eating plants. In addition to fending off the beasts, they must also deal with a mysterious man (Henry Brandon), who also lusts after Maggie. Despite the film’s obvious low budget, the special effects are somewhat credible. The Land Unknown is one of the more fast-paced and exciting of the ‘50s sci-fi flicks. 35mm.

Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
Jun Fukuda, 1966 - 87 min.

While there’s room for debate on whether Godzilla is a dinosaur per se, there’s no argument against the Godzilla movies’ key role in the development both of techniques used in dinosaur films and in the cult energy that surround them. In this delightful installment, a group of teenagers end up stranded on an island run by a brutal terrorist organization whose only merit is the protection it offers from the vicious sea monster Ebirah, who keeps the islands inhabitants isolated. The youths’ only hope is in awakening Godzilla! In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm.

Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg, 1993 - 127 min.

Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster ought to have been the dinosaur film to end all dinosaur films – though that hasn’t stopped them from making two inferior sequels, with a third on the way in 2009. Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the plot involves a millionaire who invites a trio of scientists to a private island to tour a theme park filled with dinosaurs cloned from prehistoric DNA. Something goes horribly wrong, of course. Jurassic Park introduced raptors to the collective consciousness of seven-year-olds. 35mm.
Presented and with a Q&A by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno.