An audience sits for an event in the Film/Video Theater in the Wexner Center for the Arts (Credit: Melissa Starker | Wexner Center for the Arts)
This story has been updated for the BuckeyeBound edition.
The Wexner Center for the Arts reopened its in-house film program July 9, allowing film fanatics to replace laptop screens with the big screen.
Kicking things off with a series of films directed by Lynne Hershman Leeson, a Cleveland-born filmmaker, the Film/Video Theater opened for the first time since it closed March 13, 2020, due to the pandemic, Melissa Starker, spokesperson for the Wexner Center, said. The venue is now operating at full capacity.
Starker said the Hershman Leeson film series also included an online conversation with the director July 22, hosted by the Wexner Center and Kris Paulsen, a professor in the Department of History of Art and the Film Studies program.
“She’s visited the center in the past to present her films, and so we are doing a retrospective of three of her films from the time of her career when she was doing a lot of collaborating with Tilda Swinton, the actress,” Starker said. “‘Conceiving Ada’ is a period piece, but it’s about the woman who, centuries before computers, basically wrote a computer language.”
The relationship between technology and culture is an important component of Hershman Leeson’s films, Chris Stults, associate curator in the Film/Video Department at the Wexner Center, said.
“She kind of [prophesied] this idea of personal computers allowing people to work from home and some of the great things and some of the problems that could come with that,” Stults said.
The Wexner Center will follow up the Hershman Leeson film series with the Big Picture series beginning July 30 and ending Aug. 14, Starker said. The series will feature a range of films, including “Lady and the Tramp,” “It’s Always Fair Weather,” and “Speed Racer.”
“That is really just a selection of classics and favorite films that really lose something if you watch them on a small screen,” Starker said. “[‘Speed Racer’ is] almost an overdose of visual stimuli. It’s really something.”
Stults said the Wexner Center started offering free films at the South Drive-In Theatre July 15 and will show Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” Aug. 12.
Stults said seeing a film in theaters is a unique experience that cannot be replicated on small screens without losing some of the effect.
“This will be an exciting reminder of the power of giving yourself over to a film in a dark theater,” Stults said. “We have classic, animated films that are widescreen and big-screen extravaganzas, or just really rich, detailed films that, watching it on home video, you’re going to lose that level of detail.”
The Wexner Center will also host “Unorthodocs,” an annual, nonfiction film festival, in October, Starker said. The festival, now in its fifth year, frequently showcases films that are either shortlisted or nominated for the Best Documentary Feature category at the Academy Awards.
“‘American Factory,’ which was presented as part of ‘Unorthodocs’ and also as part of a retrospective of the work of Julia Reichert, a filmmaker who’s based in Yellow Springs, got picked up by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, presented by Netflix and then went on to win the Oscar,” Starker said.
