Trinity Films

Trinity Films are excited to present a new film series: 15 Milestones in the History of Cinema! A collection of highly influential films that have left their traces in innumerable references in popular culture.

Our series opens with groundbreaking film noir/suspense movies from the 50s (Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Hitchcock's Rear Window, Dassin's Rififix) and a classic by Orson Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons). We will then brighten up your spirits with four of the greates comedies of all times: Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and Manhattan by Woody Allen. This is followed by a trip into the realms of dreams and the surreal, starting off with the silent films An Andalusian Dog by Bunuel and the legendary Metropolis by Fritz Lang, and then continued by Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Fellini's 8 1/2, Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Wings Of Desire by Wim Wenders. We finish off this term with a two-day marathon showing of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the most eccentric TV series ever produced.

All showings are at the Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, from 8:30pm, and are FREE!

Mon 30/01/2006 8:30pm

SEVEN SAMURAI

Kurosawa is the master of Japanese samurai films and this film is arguably the finest of them all. It tells the story of 7 samurai who are hired to protect a poor village from a gang of bandits. It was a primary influence behind the western 'The Magnificent Seven.' Kurosawa delivers wonderful camera angles full of depth, stunning battle scenes and a pervasive elegance which we come to associate with Japanese art. This is arguably the most influential Japanese film ever made. +

Fri 03/02/2006 8:30pm

REAR WINDOW

It would be hard to find a more perfect story for Hitchcock to tell than that of REAR WINDOW. It tells the story of a wheelchair bound photographer (James Stewart) who believes he has witnessed a murder in an apartment across the road. Helpless to act upon it Stewart tries to unravel the mystery from his living room window. This is classic Hitchcock - a fantastic thriller involving an innocent person caught up in a serious situation and it is complete with a Hitchcockian ice cold blonde, Grace Kelly. +

Sat 18/02/2006

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

Welles will forever be remembered for 'Citizen Kane,' but his second film 'The Magnificent Ambersons' made only a year later is equally audacious in cinematography. Welles tells the story of the decline of a once great family linking the dramatic change in their fortunes with the dramatic changes occuring in America at that time. The revolutionary camera angles are as fresh and innovative as ever. The film is also infamous for being messed about by the studios. In Welles' absence some 50 minutes and an unhappy ending were cut and then destroyed. In spite of this Welles' genius still shines through. While this film is not as well known as 'Citizen Kane' it is certainly as deserving of interest. +

Mon 20/02/2006 8:30pm

DUCK SOUP

The story in this film is merely a side dish to the anarchic brilliance of the Marx Brothers. This is one of the most original and wacky films ever created. It is full of great wit one minute and outragious slapstick the next. A commercial and critical failure at the time, it is now considered one of the greatest comedy films of all time. One can imagine how conventional comedy could have remained had it not been for this film. The Marx Brothers at their best. +

Tue 21/02/2006 8:30pm

RIFIFI

This is undoubtedly a milestone in its genre: the heist gone wrong. This sleek and elegant French film noir tells the story of the perfect robbery which slowly goes wrong. It has proved immensely influential to all directors working in the genre, especially Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS. It contains a famous 30 minute heist scene of almost total silence. Dassin creates a supremely stylish, as well as powerful film that still enthralls as much as it ever did. +

Sat 25/02/2006 8:30pm

SOME LIKE IT HOT

Voted by the American Film Institute to be the number-one funniest movie of all time, this film stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as a pair of unemployed musicians who are on the run from gangsters. They both are forced to hit the road in drag, taking the only jobs available with an all-girl band bound for Miami. Enroute, both men fall for lead singer and blond bombshell Sugar Kane, (Marilyn Monroe), but are unable to fulfill their desires for fear of revealing their identity. +

Mon 27/02/2006 8:30pm

DR STRANGELOVE

Stanley Kubrick's timeless satire will investigate diverse topics such as Cold War politics, bodily fluids, mutually assured destruction, alien hand syndrome, communism, capitalism, chickens and monogamy. Peter Sellers gives his legendary perfomance playing three main characters of this milestone of movie history, littered with memorable quotes. +

Sat 04/03/2006 8:30pm

MANHATTAN

Issac Davis (Woody Allen) is torn between two girlfriends: the earnest seventeen year old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), and indecisive pseudo-intellectual Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). With its glorious all-Gershwin score, its breathtakingly elegant black-and-white, widescreen cinematography by Gordon Willis (best-known for shooting the Godfather movies), its deeply shaded performances and its extremely witty screenplay full of neuroticism, this romantic comedy is Woody Allen at the peak of his creative powers. +

Mon 06/03/2006 8:30pm

AN ANDALUSIAN DOG

17 minutes of bizarre and surreal images that may or may not mean anything. A straight razor seems to be placed by a woman's eye, a small cloud formation obscures the moon, a cow's eye is slit open... UN CHIEN ANDALOU is Bunuel's first film and collaboration with Salvador Dali. It is one of the first examples of surrealistic cinema, striking and shocking, that still hasn't lost its acclaim 80 years later. With live piano accompaniment (TBC)! +

METROPOLIS

Perhaps the most famous and influential of all silent films, METROPOLIS belongs to legend as much as to cinema. The story takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and BLADE RUNNER. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, METROPOLIS stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema. With live piano accompaniment (TBC)! +

Wed 08/03/2006 8:30pm

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL

The Nobiles, a wealthy couple in Mexico City, give an elegant dinner party, which in the end the guests and hosts are misteriously unable to leave. Days pass, during which all the elaborate pretenses and facades that they have built up by virtue of their position in society collapse completely as they become reduced to living like animals. A surrealistic masterpiece. +

Fri 10/03/2006 8:30pm

8 1/2

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Fellini's masterpiece is still a mesmerizing mystery tour that has often been quoted but never duplicated. The story is about a worshipped filmmaker who has lost his inspiration. Besieged by people eager to work with him, he struggles to find his next idea for a film. The combined pressures draw him within himself, where his recollections of significant events in his life and the many lovers he has left behind begin to haunt him. The marriage of Fellini's hyperreal imagery, dreamy sidebars, and the gravity of Guido's increasing guilt and self-awareness make this as much a deeply moving, soulful film as it is an electrifying spectacle. +

Mon 13/03/2006 8:30pm

THE MIRROR

A man in his forties is going to die and remembers his past. His childhood, his mother, the war, personal moments but things that also tell the story of all the Russian nation and society... Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky's visually transcendent, artistically revelatory autobiographical film on lost innocence and emotional abandonment. Presented as a cinematic montage of modern day life, personal memories, historical news footage, and dreams, it is an introspective journey through the course of human existence, hope and despair, success and frailty. +

Fri 17/03/2006 8:30pm

WINGS OF DESIRE

Bundled in dark overcoats, angels watch over Berlin with ears open to the heartbeat of the human soul, listening to the internal musings and yearnings of earthbound humans like existential detectives to record the magic moments for some heavenly record. But when angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) falls in love with an angel of another sort, the lonely trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), he gives up the contemplation and observation of life to experience it himself. Wim Wenders's most purely romantic film is like poetry on celluloid. +

Mon 20/03/2006 and Tue 21/03/2006 8:30pm

TWIN PEAKS

Mystical and eccentric FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper arrives in the small Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks to investigate the brutal murder of Homecoming Queen and high school girl Laura Palmer and soon becomes entangled in the town's problems, people and situations, discovering that the small town is seething with deadly secrets and killer cherry pie. TWIN PEAKS is a groundbreaking TV series from the early 90s, and was the first TV series using surrealistic motives. It has the insidious weirdness of David Lynch's best movie work and is so entertaining it has to be seen to be believed. +