First and foremost our goal is to bring the best overlooked films that we can to Charlottesville, films that aren’t going to show here, films that for the most part don’t deserve to show here—by that I mean that it’s just not a market that’s pushed that heavily by the film world.
“But I think it’s a market where there’s tremendous appreciation for film, despite the fact that it’s small.”
So says Wesley Hottot, the artistic director for Offscreen, a student-run film society which is preparing for its tenth season showcasing independent, foreign and classic film at Newcomb Hall Theatre on UVA Grounds. The season kicked off late last month with a showing of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and continues through the end of April.
The schedule for this spring features a number of eclectic, imposing titles—plenty to make the eyes of curious filmgoers water with gladness. The controversial documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger is on the agenda, as is Derrida, a film about the legendary French philosopher, and In the Mirror of Maya Deren, an Austrian import about the experimental filmmaker.
If you’re sensing a theme, you should be, Hottot says. “All at once, distributors just started dumping biography films on exhibitors, and they’re all over the place,” he says. “There’s a lot out there right now; there’s about 10 or 12 that I just kept seeing in the catalogs and on the websites and in The New York Times.
“And so it just makes sense when that is happening in the distribution world to pick up on that and say to people, ‘This is what’s going on in the world outside of Charlottesville,’ which is what we try and do.”
It’s not all biography. Offscreen is also showing two David Lynch films, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, part of a regular collaboration with UVA professor Walter Korte in which a couple of more well-known titles are shown in 35 millimeter.
“We try to do something that people have probably seen, but haven’t seen in its full glory,” Hottot explains.
There’s also a screening of Decasia, a film composed entirely of nitrate-based archival footage from old Hollywood films, and a presentation by the filmmaker, Bill Morrisson.
“Over the history of American film, studios have been really bad about preserving things,” Hottot says. “They just throw it in a rubbish heap. Morrison went back and has been collecting that for years and years and years. So the film itself is sort of about cinema’s memories, and then it has its own themes of bodily decay and emotional decay.”
So how do the films get chosen? Hottot has the final say-so, as artistic director, which to a movie lover sounds like a pretty great job.
“Yeah, it is, but it’s a lot of responsibility too,” he says. “Just in my tenure I’ve been trying to make the process slightly more democratic by bringing in screeners and distributors well before the season starts and showing them to the whole group and seeing what people think, and nixing some stuff and really getting behind other things.
“Over time you start to put a series together.”—Paul Henderson
The voice for choice
Planned Parenthood faces hostility in the Assembly
Virginia’s General Assembly is wrestling with a massive budget deficit this year, yet many legislators will spend an unprecedented amount of time debating what still remains a woman’s legal right to abortion. In 2001, the General Assembly considered eight anti-abortion bills; last year, there were 12 such bills. In 2003, legislators are scheduled to consider about 25 bills aimed at restricting abortions and limiting reproductive choice.
Planned Parenthood is the only group sending lobbyists to Richmond to advocate for continued abortion rights. David Nova is president of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge, which operates five sites in Central Virginia, including one in Charlottesville. Planned Parenthood offers medical care, birth control, free pregnancy tests, counseling, prenatal care, adoption services and abortions to all women for a nominal fee. Nova is also chair of Planned Parenthood’s statewide lobby organization. This week, he talks with C-VILLE about the hostile climate he faces in Richmond.
John Borgmeyer: What’s behind this increase in abortion bills?
David Nova: Election politics is driving some of this. Another thing is that redistricting brought a lot of new social conservatives into the Virginia legislature, so some of the newest members have the most pernicious anti-abortion or anti-family planning bills.
Over the past 15 years, a number of Supreme Court decisions have weakened the original Roe v. Wade decision. There are far more possibilities and far more creativity involved now in anti-abortion legislation.
How do these bills limit abortion or family planning?
There are three different categories. First, there are measures to make it harder for women to access abortion. A good example is parental consent with a notarized signature. A parental notification law exists already, and I can’t think of any medical procedure that requires a notarized signature. It seems bizarre, but it’s designed to make it harder for women to keep their privacy, especially in small communities, and increase the hassle factor.
The second category of measures, known as TRAP bills, are designed to impose burdensome regulations on abortion providers. Among other things, they require all clinics that provide abortions to have hospital-wide corridors, wide enough to have two gurnies wheeled past each other unencumbered. In our clinics, we have one gurney, and we’ve never used it. The effect isn’t to boost a woman’s health, but to force clinics to close, move or undertake expensive renovation. Again, the lawmakers are trying to make it harder for women to receive a legal medical procedure.
In the last category are laws designed to change the status of a fetus. For example, there’s one that makes the fetus the patient in pre-natal care, instead of the mother. Another bill would recognize a fertilized egg as a child before it’s implanted in the uterus––in essence, childhood comes before pregnancy. What’s really going on is an attempt to define childhood at conception. They’re preparing for a post-Roe v. Wade world.
It’s not an ineffective strategy.
What is Planned Parenthood doing?
Our strategy right now is just trying not to be overwhelmed. It’s a matter of rallying our supporters to keep the floodgates from opening any wider. The bills most likely to pass are the parental consents with notarized signature and the so-called “partial birth” abortions.
We’ve introduced the Family Planning Protection Act, which says laws applying to abortion won’t apply to contraception. I’m cautiously optimistic it will pass in the Senate. The question is whether it can pass in the House, which is more socially conservative.
There are a number of anti-abortion bills that may not survive because they cost money, and right now there’s no money. Also, the budget deficit makes legislators wary of passing bills that may provoke an expensive legal challenge from Planned Parenthood or other groups. That’s what happened last year with the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban. It cost American taxpayers over $100,000 before it was found to be unconstitutional. Last year, Governor Warner vetoed a ban passed by the General Assembly; the House voted to override the veto, but it was sustained in the Senate.
This year, Virginia’s “partial birth” bills are trying to be more constitutional, but we don’t think they go far enough. Actually, no one’s ever heard of a “partial birth” procedure happening in Virginia. The procedure exists, but in reality it happens very rarely.
There’s currently a bill that would allow people to get the slogan “Choose Life” on their license plates. This is political speech. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t be able to get “Let A Woman Decide” on a license plate. There’s some question as to whether this is constitutional.
Can the government permit one side of the debate but not the other on what is, arguably, government property?––John Borgmeyer