Announcing The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival
Into the Night: Cornell Woolrich and Film Noir
Programmed by Rob King, Film and Media Studies, Columbia University School of the Arts
March 27–31, 2019
The Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University
“As a master of dread, he has conceivably no pulp equal.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Short story maestro, former Columbia student, muse of suspense filmmakers: Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) lived all of these lives. A prolific man of letters, Woolrich has had his novels and stories adapted into nearly 40 films and dozens of episodes of radio and television. Yet despite his strong influence on the postwar crime film, Woolrich has remained overshadowed by his hard-boiled contemporaries: Chandler, Hammett, and Cain.
The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival seeks to correct this oversight. The festival will present 12 adaptations of Woolrich’s fiction: from the canonized masterworks of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut to lesser known “B” films and Monogram potboilers. Many films will be screened in 35mm.
Screenings will be accompanied by discussions featuring film scholars Ann Douglas, Frank Krutnik, James Naremore, Francis M. Nevins, and Pamela Wojcik. Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library will also host an accompanying exhibit of items from the Cornell Woolrich Papers, which reside at Columbia University.
Featuring:
Black Angel (Neill, 1946)
The Bride Wore Black (Truffaut, 1968)
The Chase (Ripley, 1946)
Deadline at Dawn (Clurman, 1946)
Fall Guy (Le Borg, 1947)
“Four O’Clock” (Hitchcock, 1957)
The Guilty (Reinhardt, 1947)
The Leopard Man (Tourneur, 1943)
Nightmare (Shane, 1956)
Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)
The Return of the Whistler (Lederman, 1948)
The Window (Tetzlaff, 1949)
This festival is funded by a generous gift from alumnus Gordon Kit (Columbia College ’76), in honor of his parents.
Tickets: $12 General Admission / $10 Senior Citizen (65 and older) / $8 Student
Packages: $40 for four films / $75 for all films
Advanced ticket sales online; online and onsite sales on the day of screenings.
Sales begin late‑February.
For more information, visit the Kit Noir website at https://arts.columbia.edu/noir, or contact [email protected].
The Lenfest Center for the Arts is a dynamic new hub for cultural and civic exchange in Upper Manhattan. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and led by Columbia University School of the Arts, the 60,000-square-foot facility is the second building to open on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus. Programming for New Yorkers of all ages will take place within four double-height, state-of-the-art venues, including The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, a 150-seat theater with both advanced digital technology and 35mm archival capability, for screenings, festivals, critical surveys, and new media. Recent guests include Art Ensemble of Chicago, Olivier Babinet, Tom Finkelpearl, Greta Gerwig, Rithy Panh, Laura Poitras, Julie Taymor, and Carolee Schneemann.
Columbia University School of the Arts awards the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts and Writing, the Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies, and an interdisciplinary program in Sound Art. The School is a thriving, diverse community of committed artists from around the world and a faculty comprised of internationally renowned film and theatre directors, writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, playwrights, screenwriters, producers, critics, scholars, visual artists, and sound artists.
Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street (between Broadway and 12th Avenue)