Richard Chew presents four DFT Double Features in June...
Detroit Free Press, WDET-FM, 6/9
"Chew seeing double at DFT"
Veteran Hollywood film editor Richard Chew, who has been in Detroit since last fall as a visiting professor at Wayne State University, is appearing at the Detroit Film Theatre this month to lead a series of double-feature screenings. The series launches at 6 p.m. today with "The Bicycle Thief," Vittorio De Sica's 1945 account of a Rome-based poster hanger, his son and their all-important family bicycle. Chew also spoke about his film editing career with WDET's Rob St. Mary.
http://www.wdet.org/news/story/RichardChewInDetroit/
Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning The Bicycle Thief defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, The Bicycle Thief embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy. Oscar-winning film editor Richard Chew, who is the Bob Allison (Allesee) Media Professor in the Department of Communication, Wayne State University, will introduce a screening of The Bicycle Thief, and will then present a film he edited - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) starring Jack Nicholson - which he feels was strongly influenced by De Sica's film. Mr. Chew will answer questions about both films following the screenings.
Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) - the story of a petty hoodlum (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his girlfriend (Jean Seberg) on the streets of Paris - was one of the most revolutionary and influential films of the French New Wave. It was a particularly powerful experience for Richard Chew, who will introduce this special screening and will follow it with a showing of a 2001 film he edited, I Am Sam, starring Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a movie Mr. Chew feels was greatly influenced by Breathless, and he'll present the reasons and discuss both films with the audience following their screenings.
Director Mike Nichols' The Graduate burst upon American movie screens in 1967, immediately becoming a cultural touchstone for an entire filmgoing generation. The then-young Richard Chew was not immune to the pull of Nichols' vision - or to the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft - and he'll talk about how The Graduate was in his mind while editing Risky Business (with Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay) into its finished form some 15 years later. Following the screening of both films, Mr. Chew will discuss them in a Q and A with the audience.
Film editor Richard Chew's final presentation in his special series of DFT DOUBLE FEATURES begins with director and cinematographer Haskell Wexler's remarkable 1969 film Medium Cool, a portrait of a TV news photographer (Robert Forster) who finds himself inextricably bound up with the violence taking place around the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The film's pioneering blend of fictional and non-fictional footage was a big influence on Mr. Chew, who will follow Medium Cool with a 2006 film he edited, Bobby, directed by Emilio Estevez. Bobby also blends dramatic and non-fictional footage to portray how the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy impacted the lives of characters in and around the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the shooting took place. Following his presentation of both films, Mr. Chew will discuss their style, impact and cinematic influence with the audience.
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These events, which are part of the Detroit Film Theatre's Summer 2011 Schedule, are made possible by the Bob Allison (Allesee) Endowed Chair in Media in the Department of Comunication at Wayne State University. Mr. Chew appears courtesy of the Visiting Artists program of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.