WRITTEN ON THE WIND tonight (5/5) at 8pm for FREE at Rough Draft!

Hey friends! Very excited to be showing Douglas Sirk’s 1956 film Written on the Wind tonight at Rough Draft, located at 82 John St. in Kingston. This free screening starts at 8pm. Feel free to come a few minutes early to grab a seat, as well as a drink from the Rough Draft bar and some of our tasty popcorn.

Unfortunately we won’t be able to screen our originally scheduled film, The Red Shoes tonight. This is one of the perils of the “nontheatrical” screening world- it doesn’t happen often, but studios can pull the rights to show a film, and in this case, they did.

Written on the Wind was suggested as a substitute by board member (and programming committee member) Steven Swarbrick, and he’s written a little bit about the film and why he chose it. As a sidenote, if you’re a fan of Steven’s writing, his third book The Earth Is Evil, about cinema and the environment, comes out this October, and you can preorder it right here.

“Steven here. I’m delighted to introduce Douglas Sirk’s 1956 film, Written on the Wind. It’s got so much going for it: family drama, frustrated desire, jaw-dropping cinematography, and biting humor. Part of what makes Sirk’s films so special is their embrace of melodrama, a genre that had long been dismissed as ‘sentimental’ (code for female and queer; the sentimental genre was also racialized) and therefore undeserving of serious attention. After Sirk’s melodramas of the 1950s, one could no longer deny the importance of this emotionally explosive genre. Melo- means song, highlighting the genre’s interest in dramatic expression, as if everyone on screen were about to burst into melody. They don’t. But you sense an operatic strain just beneath the surface of every word and gesture. The philosopher Stanley Cavell devotes an entire book to melodrama for this reason, arguing that the genre navigates metaphysical problems at the most human level: the relationship, the breakup, and its uncertain future. Although Sirk’s films focus on heterosexual relationships, they’ve inspired queer films and directors (Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodóvar among them), suggesting that the philosophical melodrama Cavell identifies exceeds the heteronormativity of Sirk’s time and place. At least, that is how I view Written on the Wind, my favorite of Sirk’s films. It centers on a Texas oil family, including oil magnate Jasper Hadley, his daughter Marylee, and his son Kyle (no relation to KFF board member Kyle Black). Written can be read as a study of the fossil capitalism devouring our planet. It is also a gender drama. The film explores the fragility and (paging Dr. Freud) sexual insecurity of its male subjects in contrast to the boldness and promiscuity of its female characters, Marylee and Lucy Moore, a secretary working for the Hadley Oil Company. Written on the Wind isn’t exactly subtle. It’s excessive, filmed in eye-popping technicolor (think The Wizard of Oz), and speaks to our current moment of social and environmental fragmentation. I love it and hope you will, too.”

If you have any other questions, feel free to reply to this email and we’ll get back to you ASAP. See you there!

-KFF