Emory Cinematheque
Spring 2024 Cinematheque
The Emory Cinematheque, a series of free, professional film screenings offered by the Department of Film and Media and Emory College of Arts and Sciences, is back for its 42nd season. For Spring 2024, we are pleased to present “A.I. and Film,” curated by Associate Professor Gregory Zinman.
The use of AI was a central bargaining point in Hollywood’s recent writers’ and actors’ guild strikes and remains a hotly debated topic in terms of automated labor, pedagogy, medicine, business, and warfare. This series examines the provocative ways that artificial intelligence has been depicted in film. While the question of AI’s proliferation, the ethics of its use, and its status as an existential threat loom as our contemporary moment’s twinned technological and epistemological crises, cinema has been wrestling with the subject for decades, stretching all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and its conflation of exploitable labor and unleashed eros in the proto-fembot figure of Maria.
In cinema, AI takes on many forms: insane supercomputers, killer androids, confused clones, and disembodied lovers. These sentient beings are not only intelligent machines, but also often fully embodied humanoids—clones, cyborgs, mechas, copies, replicants, and droids. AI in movies is deliberately similar to humans in one way or another; their appearance and manner only complicates their status as “other.” Films about AI thus hold up a mirror to humankind and asks us to consider the nature of what it means to be human and whether there are limits to that humanity. They ask us to consider the horizons of possibility for new and different kinds of intelligence, and whether they are compatible with society—and in what ways. They raise questions about the care and ethical responsibility we might have to forms of artificial intelligence.
“The films in this series make us think about the capacity of machines to be human,” says Zinman, “and, in turn, as our every desire is increasingly datafied, to ask how we are becoming more like machines ourselves.”
One of the themes in this series is the creation of new artificial life intended to relieve work, suffering, or responsibility. Free from standard means and pains of procreation and reproduction, cinema’s AIs promise to alleviate the burdens of family and workplace alike. Yet it is this very fear of replacement that animates our current off-screen fears about what AI will mean for the future of humanity. Can we outsource labor and love equally?
“We are excited to present a wide range of films—from indie comedies to cult classics to stateof-the-art blockbusters—that speak to the fears, hopes, and desires of our current sociotechnological moment,” says Zinman.
All screenings are on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. in White Hall, Room 208. The Cinematheque runs from January 24 until April 24 and is free and open to the public. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings will be 4K restorations on DCP. They will be introduced by Zinman, with postscreening Q&A’s. For more information, visit the Emory Film and Media website or call 404- 727-6761.
Featuring Special Introduction by Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda
Steven Spielberg’s heartrending interpolation of Pinocchio is about an android who wants to be a real boy. With their biological son in suspended animation, a grieving couple adopt David (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype mecha developed by Professor Hobby (William Hurt) who can be programmed to love unconditionally. Eventually abandoned into a climate disaster-ravaged world, David befriends a polyamorous sexbot, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, in a performance that draws inspiration from Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire) to find the Blue Fairy who can grant him his ultimate wish. A.I. was originally going to be made by Stanley Kubrick, who began developing the film in the 1970s, but whose frustration with the day’s special effects stalled his efforts. In the mid-1990s, he turned the project over to Spielberg, who pays homage to Kubrick’s oeuvre (look for nods to The Shining and 2001) and uses many of the original designs for the film, making for a work that combines and reveals the two director’s distinctly different sensibilities in surprising ways.
Presented with the Emory Office of Ethics and the Arts
A roundtable discussion featuring Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, Director of Emory’s Center for Ethics, Laura Asherman, documentarian and Director of Ethics and the Arts, and Dr. Tanine Allison, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, will follow the screening.
This British-American coproduction, recently nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Debut Director at British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs), concerns the increasingly vexed topic of revenge porn—“a type of digital abuse in which nude or sexually explicit photos or videos are shared without the consent of those pictured.” The film follows college student Taylor Klein as she tries to figure out how her likeness was used in online pornography. Structured by an apropos twist that won’t be revealed in these notes, Another Body demands that we rethink the constantly changing legal and psychological nature of identity in the digital age.
Ridley Scott’s loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? produced one of the most iconic and influential films of the 20th century in Blade Runner, a grimy, dystopian neo-noir about the value of life—regardless of whether that life is real or artificial. Harrison Ford shucks off his trademark charm in favor of a muted, weary performance as Rick Deckard, a plainclothes police officer in rain-soaked 2019 Los Angeles tasked with violently “retiring” four escaped offworld “replicants” led by Rutger Hauer’s tragic Roy Batty. These rebellious androids have come to Earth illegally, seeking to extend their short lives. When Deckard visits Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the creator of the Nexus-6 replicants, he falls for Tyrell’s assistant Rachael (Sean Young), who doesn’t seem to know her true nature. The Final Cut of the film is the only version over which Scott retained complete artistic and editorial control, restoring a lost unicorn dream sequence and eschewing Harrison’s lifeless and cliched voice over for a greater emphasis on Jordan Croenweth’s visionary cinematography, Vangelis’ glacial electronic score, 2001 alum Douglas Trumbull’s extraordinary special effects, and production designer Lawrence Paull’s neon-fired sets.
This contemplative film follows a family’s attempt to repair their beloved but no-longer functioning “technosapien,” Yang (Justin H. Min), an intelligent android older sibling to struggling tea shop proprietor Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra’s (Jodie Turner-Smith) adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). After an illegal memory-bank removal process allows Jake access to Yang’s memories, revelations about Yang’s life and loves slowly emerge, especially as they relate to a clone named Ada (Haley Lu Richardson). Director Kogonada (Columbus) and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb’s expressive use of glass and metals surfaces and careful framing evokes the look and themes of Spielberg’s A.I. while providing an empathetic rumination on the care and preservation of our technological brethren. After Yang imagines AI not as a threat, but rather as a mirror held up to our shared humanity and mortality, a melancholy theme beautifully supported by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s moving score—his last prior to his passing last year.
Print courtesy of the David Bordwell Collection at the Academy Film Archive
An absolute corker of hard-nosed techno-horror, The Terminator propelled its director and star into Hollywood’s stratosphere and made “Skynet” a shorthand for out-of-control AI capable of enslaving or eradicating humankind. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the iconic and notoriously laconic (he has only 100 words of dialog) role of a cybernetic assassin sent back in time by the ruling machines from the far-flung future of 2029 to kill Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), who will give birth to the boy who will grow up to be the leader of the human resistance movement. Kyle (Michael Biehn) is the human rebel fighter tasked with saving Sarah. A chase movie par excellence, the film not only spawned five sequels, but instantiates the AI arms race currently being discussed by in boardrooms and war rooms around the world. “It’s not just about what AI gets invented. It’s about who applies it first,” Christopher Kirchhoff, a former director of strategic planning for the National Security Council who helped run the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office, warned last year. Marked by James Cameron’s (Aliens, the Abyss, Titanic, Avatar) exacting direction, and Stan Winston’s celebrated makeup and effects work, The Terminator also helped propagate the ‘80s hard body masculinity that would be taken to steroidal extremes in the era’s action films that followed its success.
“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?...How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?” technoterroist Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) asks computer programmer/possible messiah Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who goes by the nom de hacker Neo. With the help of Morpheus, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and a ragtag group of “unplugged” human rebels, Neo learns that reality is in fact a simulation run by sentient machines powered by billions of humans in suspended animation—and that he might be The One who can manipulate and destroy these machines, thereby liberating humanity. The turn-of-the-millennium thriller somehow mainstreamed both Baudrillard and cyberpunk through innovative “bullet time” special effects, startling fight choreography by Hong Kong action legend Yuen Woo-ping, and stunning visuals by director siblings Lily and Lana Wachowski. While the film won a host of technical Oscars, its ability to interrogate the nature of free will through kinetic filmmaking and wall-to-wall ass-kicking cemented it as one of the most well-loved and impactful blockbusters of all time. More recently, The Matrix’s themes of claiming one’s true identity, and its depiction of transformative mental and physical experiences, have led the film, made by formerly closeted trans filmmakers, to be embraced and celebrated as a trans allegory of self-knowledge.
Fall 2023 Cinematheque
The Emory Cinematheque, a series of free professional film screenings offered by the Department of Film and Media and Emory College of Arts and Sciences, is pleased to present “The Cinematic Worlds of David Lynch.” One of the most significant, eccentric, challenging, debated, and multifaceted American filmmakers still working today, Lynch has long operated on the fringes of Hollywood and his directorial career has been marked by several highs and lows. Although none of Lynch’s films have been massive hits, his name alone conjures the surreal peculiarity, dark humor, and ambivalent audiovisual tone defining his cinematic signature, a sensibility and atmosphere that many simply call “Lynchian.”
"In many ways, David Lynch’s filmmaking career has been distinguished by the consistency of his vision—even as he moves through different media, genres, and platforms—and the inconsistency of critical and commercial success,” remarks Dr. Timothy Holland, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, who curated the series. “He remains a remarkable figure in the world of cinema not only for his ability to create unforgettable films and those ‘Lynchian’ scenes and characters he’s famous for, but also his ability to keep creating on his own terms. His films belong neither to the mainstream nor the avant-garde, but occupy a space in relation to both, a space unique to his imagination, artistic output, and hold on our cultural consciousness."