Well, clearly, this weekend it’s going to be Spielberg’s second installment into what is shaping up to be a trilogy of post 9/11 exploits of the pop-unconscious. We got the airport safety reclamation project THE TERMINAL in 2004, and now, in every theatre you can find, we have the WAR OF THE WORLDS, a sobering study of the United States’ lack of military preparedness in the event of intergalactic warfare. And, coming soon, we’ll see what the IMDb is calling UNTITLED 1972 MUNICH OLYMPICS PROJECT: Spielberg’s Tony Kushner scripted exploration of guilt-ridden Mossad hitmen going after the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the ’72 Munich games.

There’s a good NY Times article that says all this even better (you need to suffer the indignity of registering for free):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/movies/01spie.html

But just to maintain the credibility of this blog: if you’ve never seen J.P. Melville’s LE CERCLE ROUGE, this weekend you get a rare chance at Cinema du Parc. Melville is most famous for BOB LE FLAMBEUR, which suffered a dopey yet fitfully entertaining remake by Neil Jordan called THE GOOD THIEF. Expect hard-boiled dialogue by an aristocratic thief, witty cinematography, and ironic Americanisms of the sort that only a French Americaphile like Melville can pull off. See it before John Woo remakes it.

Le Cercle rouge [2:20]
Fri, Sat, Sun, Thu: 5:00
Mon, Wed: 8:30
Tue: 7:00

Last year, at around this time, a number of Synoptique staffers were involved with the 3rd INTERNATIONAL WOMEN AND THE SILENT SCREEN CONGRESS.

http://cinema.concordia.ca/wscreen

A special SYNOPTIQUE edition followed that September, featuring dazzling recreations of panel presentations given by silent cinema gurus Tom Gunning, Christine Gledhill, and Concordia professor Rosanna Maule.

http://articles.synoptique.ca/wscreen

So, now, we’re more than happy to announce information on the 4th international WSCREEN conference, held next year in sunny Guadalajara, Mexico:

Please join us for the Fourth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference which will be held at the University of Guadalajara in the beautiful colonial city of Guadalajara, Mexico June 7 through June 10, 2006. Following the first Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held in Utrecht in 1999, the second in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001, and the third in Montreal in 2004, the Guadalajara conference will include scholarly panels and workshops that advance research on historical and theoretical issues related to women and silent cinema from 1898 through 1937. The Call for Papers in English and Spanish will be published shortly.

The WWSC co-directors

Patricia Torres San Martin
University of Guadalajara

Joanne Hershfield
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill