Film and TV appreciation
Each meeting will comprise a discussion about the merits of a film or TV programme the group has viewed before coming to or at the meeting.
Leader: Ted Childs.
Location of meetings: Upper Meeting Room at the Vision Hall at Christchurch.
Day and time of meetings: usually first Thursday of the month from 10.00 am to 12.30 pm.
For November, the meeting of the Film and TV Appreciation Group will be Thursday, 14th November. The time and venue will be as normal, ie 10.00 am at Vision Hall, Watling Street.
On this occasion, as we are at a time of remembrance, the film is Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Produced, directed and partially written by Kubrick, the film was first released in 1957. It starred Kirk Douglas and was the first major film in the Kubrick canon which was to establish him as one of the 20th Century's most accomplished directors, a film-maker of great innovation and imagination, now remembered more for the classics that followed this film, such as 2001, a Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Doctor Strangelove, The Shining et al.
Although set in a French Army unit in action during the First World War, it is regarded by .many as an anti-war piece, reflecting the view that Kubrick articulated in several of his films that war is ultimate folly. Essentially the film depicts how vanity, ambition and the amorality and corruption that it engenders can have disastrously fatal consequences for the rank-and-file soldier. Although loosely based on events that actually happened in France during 1915, the response to the film proved quite controversial. It was mot screened in France until many years after it was first released,
Paths of Glory won a number of awards and accolades but it was not an overwhelming commercial success due, in part, to the uncomfortable moral questions it provoked.. The passage if time has not entirely diminished these concerns.
We shall be making our usual charge of £3 per person to cover room hire and refreshment. As before, I would be grateful if, say, three persons would volunteer to look after the "catering" arrangements.
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