About This Year's Selection
We asked Tyler Stovall, Dean of the Undergraduate Division, to explain what compelled the deans to choose Ang Lee and James Schamus as the featured artists for On the Same Page for 2008-09. Here is his response:
How do artists interpret and ultimately transform our world? This year On The Same Page will feature two leaders of current cinema, Ang Lee and James Schamus. We will discuss two of their most important films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm. Our culture has become increasingly visual, and yet many of us know little about how to "read" films. In studying the work of Ang Lee and James Schamus, we will try to understand the structures and techniques that give films their power to stir us. At its best, cinema challenges the boundaries between entertainment and art, and these two movies provide classic examples of how this is done.
Ang Lee is an Academy Award-winning director who has made several films in collaboration with producer and screenwriter James Schamus, holder of a PhD in English from Berkeley. Schamus and Lee have explored many central realms of the human experience in their films: love, fantasy, sex, and death. The two films we are highlighting this year, The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, deploy two very different genres to explore these timeless themes in two very different settings: suburban Connecticut in the 1970s and ancient China. Bringing both Schamus and Lee to Berkeley enables us to learn more about collaboration in the arts.
The work of Lee and Schamus also illuminates interactions between different types of creative endeavor. Lee and Schamus have worked on several adaptations of novels to the screen, for example, Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), The Ice Storm (Rick Moody), and Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx). We hope students will enjoy exploring the question of what is gained and lost when works are "translated" from one medium to another. In addition, much of Schamus and Lee's work has been historical, so that we might also consider what makes a good historical film and how the cinema shapes our very notions of the past.
The residence halls are hosting screenings of several of Ang Lee's films in February.
