The Palm Springs Cultural Center’s Historic Camelot Theatre is cranking up the air conditioning and lowering the lights for a cinematic journey to the top of the thermometer! Starting July 2nd, the Palm Springs based nonprofit film archive, Deserted Films, presents the Summer Heat Film Series, a curated collection of movies where the heat is practically a character. Sit in air-conditioned comfort and behold a series of films set against the weather we are all seeking relief from!
“Interesting things happen when it’s hot,” says series curator Devin Orgeron of Deserted Films. “And we think that’s pretty cool.”
Each screening will feature a live introduction and thematic film ephemera provided by Deserted Films.
The Summer Heat Film Series kicks off Sunday, July 2nd at 6pm with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). It’s New York City. It’s a heatwave. Everyone’s windows are open. What could possibly go wrong? We can count on Hitchcock to show us!
On July 9, the heat moves south to the French Quarter with Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). With literal and metaphorical temperatures rising, Tennessee Williams’ characters simmer in tense and heartbreaking scenes that helped catapult Marlon Brando’s career.
Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) is up on July 23. A cartoonish look at midcentury marriage, Wilder’s film finds its characters cooling off in a variety of ways. That notorious image of Marylin Monroe is just one of them.
August 6 will showcase Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), where soaring temperatures are an evocative metaphor for racial tensions. This landmark film remains relevant in contemporary discussions of race in the U.S.
On August 27, Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) will intensify our collective sense of discomfort and closeness. Mostly taking place in one confined space, this influential courtroom drama remains an engrossing conversation starter.
September 3 brings Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), where a murder in steamy Mississippi unfolds into a poignant exploration of 1960s race relations.
The series concludes on September 17 with Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown (1974), set in a hot, thirsty 1930s Los Angeles.
Tickets are available here. Located at 2300 E Baristo Rd, the Palm Springs Cultural Center’s Historic Camelot Theatre is renowned by movie lovers, boasting one of the largest screens in the Coachella Valley and a state-of-the-art sound system.
About Deserted Films: Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron have dedicated the better parts of their lives to film and to the preservation of our collective visual history…especially as that history plays out in “lesser known” or “ephemeral” film. Orgeron, a widely published emeritus professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University has spent the last eighteen years researching, writing about, and sharing films made to advertise goods and services, films made to educate and instruct children and adults, and films made by amateurs to commemorate important as well as everyday events. He is editor-in-chief of The Moving Image (the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists), an academic journal that celebrates these interests. Dollman is a trained audiovisual archivist with a Ph.D. in American Studies, and a former board director for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Her research often focuses on the role ephemeral films play in our understanding of our shared cultural heritage and as documentary evidence. As such she has focused on “nontheatrical” films…. films made to screen in alternative venues (churches, prisons, schools, fairs, lodges, conventions, etc.) and home movies. Her work on the Tribesourcing Southwest Film project, for example, has sought to bring historical nontheatrical films depicting Native American communities back to those communities for reinterpretation and re-narration by members of those communities.
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