Let’s Talk Conflict

This weekend there will be a series of events from groups on campus tackling tough material: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Saturday afternoon there will be a special performance of a one-woman play that gives a unique perspective into the conflict through the story of a 23-year-old American activist who was bulldozed in 2003 while trying to stop the demolition of a house in Gaza. While the details of her death are contested, the legal investigations that followed determined the incident to be an accident. My Name Is Rachel Corrie was edited and organized by journalist Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman from diary entries and e-mails left behind by Rachel. The show has a history of being a conversation starter around the United States. Fittingly, Let’s Talk Conflict will be co-hosting a faculty-facilitated conversation afterward about the play and the greater issues it brings up. Food and drinks will be served for the discussion. The following day Students for Justice in Palestine and TAPS will be hosting a workshop, Theatre of the Oppressed, led by Ashley Malloy and Josh Perlstein, that focuses on how the arts can be used for nonviolent resistance, with a focus on the Middle East tensions. Participators will develop scenarios and monologues from personal experiences.

November 18, Logan Center Performance Hall, show at 2:30 p.m. with conversation at 4:15 p.m., $2 with UCID and $5 without

 November 19, Logan Center Room 802, 10 a.m., 1 p.m., free, register ahead  

—Evangeline Reid

Dudley Andrew

It may be the season for Oscar contenders in mainstream cinema land, but a lot of film buffs will take a classic that has stood the test of time over ephemeral awards bait any day.  That day just might be this Thursday.  Yale professor Dudley Andrew will appear at the Logan Center to discuss the classic Humphrey Bogart–starring thriller Dark Passage (directed by Delmer Daves, 1947) .  But there’s a twist.  Andrew will be discussing the film specifically through the lens of André Bazin’s influential writings on film theory.  That might sound like the most boring thing possible to some people, but to the cinema studies major in your life this is Christmas come early.  Bazin was the premier theorist of the neorealism movement in the 1940s, as well as one of the first critics to write about the significance of Orson Welles’s magnum opus Citizen Kane.

Andrew has taught cinema studies and comparative literature at both Yale and the University of Iowa.  He has received many distinctions, including being named a member of both the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

November 20, Logan Center Room 201, 5 p.m., free

—James Mackenzie