Film series combines classic Hollywood, avant-garde cinema

It's not often there's a chance to see a 1920s German adaptation of "Dracula." But thanks to the City Lights and Underground film series, it's possible to see this and other unconventional films every weekend for free.\nThe City Lights and Underground film series screens new experimental or classic films at 7 p.m. every Friday in room 251 of the Radio/Television Building behind the Wells Library. \nThe series, which is sponsored by the Department of Communication and Culture, evolved from two separate programs. \n"City Lights was classic Hollywood. Underground was independent and avant-garde," said Amanda Keeler, a cinema and media studies graduate student who has helped maintain the series. \nIn 1998, communication and culture graduate students started the City Lights film series, Keeler said.\n"Every year we get a few new graduate students in our department to participate," Keeler said in an e-mail. "Its basic purpose is to be a showcase for the large collection of 16-mm films that IU owns."\nTraci Gibboney, who was a Ph.D. student and associate instructor at the time, founded the Underground film series in 2004.\n"I don't think we showed anything later than the '60s, mostly classics," said doctoral student of communication and culture Jason Sperb.\nCity Lights merged with Underground in 2005 to create the current series. Now the series has encompassed both the classic films of City Lights and the avant-garde films of Underground.\nThe series tends to gather anywhere from five to 50 attendees, Keeler said.\nOn Nov. 18, the series screened "Open City," a moralist Italian film that was one of the first to portray the Italian resistance to Nazi occupation toward the end of World War II.\nSeveral dozen people, including freshman Sam Caughlin, attended the showing of this vintage Italian film.\n"I thought it was fascinating," Caughlin said. "I like that (City Lights and Underground) don't play mainstream films. They play stuff I usually wouldn't be able to see." \nContinuing the series, the film group will hold a special "Women and Childbearing Choices Night" Dec. 1. The night will showcase three short films: Claudia Weill and Joyce Chopra's "Joyce at 34," which follows Chopra's first difficult year of motherhood; Marjorie Keller's "Misconception," a six-part film about a woman's childbirth experience; and Betsy Weiss' "Mother Load," an alternative documentary about the choice women face in whether or not to bear a child.\nDec. 8's films are Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," a film about a renowned stage artist who suffers a nervous breakdown, and Jennifer Montogmery's "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome," a film about political inquiry, personal reckoning and the decline of Super 8 format.\nFor more information on the City Lights and Underground film series and its upcoming showings, visit www.indiana.edu/~uground.