Hibbleton Film Series presents: A Tour of American Cinema

Every Monday night this summer, award-winning filmmaker Steve Elkins will present a different American film. All screenings begin at 8pm and are FREE. A discussion will follow each screening. Here’s the lineup so far:

July 25: “RETURN TO OZ” (Walter Murch, 1985)
William S. Burroughs will rant and rave and shoot guns around his Kansas home as an introduction (via celluloid) to Walt Disney’s supremely fucked up (i.e. amazing) “Return To Oz,” in which Dorothy receives electro-shock therapy, befriends a flying couch with a talking taxidermy head, is imprisoned by the Wicked Witch of the North and her hallway of screaming heads, faces the demon army of the Nome King, and generally finds Oz in ruins under the control of characters that could have been cast in a Hellraiser film. Written and directed by Walter Murch, the legendary editor and sound designer of “Apocalypse Now” and “The Godfather” trilogy (not to mention co-writer of George Lucas’s pre-Star Wars cult classic “THX-1138”), “Return To Oz” remains the most bizarre thing ever released by Disney, which terrified an entire generation of children, and is far more accurate to the actual content of the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum between 1900 and 1920 than the famous Judy Garland film of 1939.

August 1: “WISE BLOOD” (John Huston, 1979)
One of America’s most legendary directors, John Huston, made countless classics ranging from “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) to “Annie” (1982), but lesser known is his magnificent adaptation of Flannery’ O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood,” about the crisscrossing paths of a guy in a gorilla suit, a mummified dwarf, and a prophet starting the “Church Without Christ.” O’Connor’s surreal novels about her home state of Georgia were inspired by the sacramental Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. A kind of literary precursor to David Lynch, she wrote grotesque allegories about deceptively backward Southern characters (usually fundamentalist Protestants), who undergo transformations of character through ludicrous behavior that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind.