Events

As a program committed to lively and engaged media culture, we encourage you to share with us upcoming media events and ongoing media projects in Columbia and the Southeast of interest to others.  Please send postings for this list to: lhill@mailbox.sc.edu.

Dennis James
Silent film maestro to present
Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl (1929)
Recital Hall, University of South Carolina
November 15, 2008
Free and Open to the Public

Student atheists! Religious battles on campus! Reform school! Fatal accidents! Sadistic jailers! And more!!!

Internationally renowned silent film accompanist Dennis James returns to Columbia, SC for a free night of (mostly) silent film with live musical accompaniment on Nov. 15 at 7:30PM in the Recital Hall of the University of South Carolina’s School of Music. James performs with The Godless Girl (1929), directed by consummate Hollywood showman, master of sensation and spectacle, Cecile B. DeMille.

“One of the strangest movies ever made by eternally un-ironic über-bombast DeMille! Shot just a few years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the film opens on a sexually charged college campus war pitting cute co-ed atheists against an angry mob of Christian believers. Some collateral damage lands the two main religious adversaries, played with the electrifying lust we've come to demand of DeMille, in a bizarre reform school where girls and boys toil out their sentences segregated flimsily by a tantalizing, see-through fence!”
                                            –Guy Maddin, filmmaker frequently referred to as “the Canadian David Lynch”

This free, public screening takes part in the reintroduction of The Godless Girl to modern audiences.  Though rarely seen before now, a film print preserved by the George Eastman House recently premiered at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and the film is featured in a DVD project, Treasures of American Film Archives, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Film Preservation Board. The Godless Girl will appear on “Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934.” “An exposé of the brutal conditions in juvenile reformatories, the film shocked moviegoers and led to reforms.”

Originally shot as a silent film, some sound was added to The Godless Girl to help it compete in the emerging world of talking pictures.    

This is the fourth in an annual series of silent film screenings with live accompaniment by James, who tours internationally as a composer and musician specializing in recreating historically-informed scores for silent film. The series is hosted by USC’s Film and Media Studies Program and School of Music. Free and open to the public. For more info. call: (803) 777-2361.