Opening Night Glam Gala

Opening Night with Velvet Goldmine Director Todd Haynes

Costumes encouraged!
November 9, 2012
6:00 Doors 6:30 Show

VIP RECEPTION W/TODD HAYNES
9:30

MYSTERY SCREENING
with Special Mystery Guest
10:15 Doors 10:30 Show

Opening Night All Access Pass
[Velvet Goldmine + VIP Reception + Mystery Screening]
$30 Student (With I.D.) / OFS member; $40 Non-member

Velvet Goldmine
$12 Student (With I.D.)/ OFS member; $18 Non-member

Mystery Screening
$7 OFS member; $10 Non-member

Thanks to our event sponsor, Olympia Food COOP!

VELVET GOLDMINE
1998 / USA / 124 min / 35mm
Todd Haynes will be in attendance.
Director: Todd Haynes Cast: Christian Bale, Toni Colette, Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers Print Source: Killer Films

Directly influenced by Orson Welles’ massive Citizen Kane, Todd Haynes’ 1998 epic fictionalized fragmentary biopic of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Velvet Goldmine maps the transatlantic and transmodern anxiety of dandyism, glam and pop as it digs a deep an opulent narrative goldmine. It is a film for music fans, lovers of musicals, fashion fetishists and literary fops alike, and no one can say at the end in which direction history is headed. Envelopes of flashbacks cast contemporary journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) as a tortured teenager whose sexuality erupts out of the flash of album covers, platform shoes and the exquisite hip moves of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), our faux-Bowie, who moons at, wrestles with and falls in love with Curt Wild (Ewan MacGregor), our ersatz Iggy. Haynes’ approach, as always, is to use cinema to write an essay on pop culture itself, constellating Jean Genet and Oscar Wilde overhead, while below, the protagonists measure themselves against the fantasies that drive them. It’s a queer and human cinema, for sure, in that all of the lushness and theatricality of Haynes’ films also stands just slightly aside, pointing to (in the most Brechtian sense) that slim gap between reality and appearance, between language and desire, and between pop sweetness and melancholy. An important turning point in Haynes’ career, this film takes up the subjects of his earlier films but on a much more ambitious scale. Not to be missed – you’ll dance in your seat and prance and sing down the aisles after the show!