Irwin Library Film Series: Harold and Maude

The Irwin Library Film Series returns for its third year with a new theme – Irwin Closet Picks! Honoring the popular Criterion Closet Picks video series, Butler Libraries faculty have picked their favorite Criterion Collection releases from the ‘Irwin Closet’ to showcase this year, and will introduce, contextualize, and appreciate them at this year’s screenings. Criterion publishes “important classic and contemporary films from around the world,” and this year’s series will span black & white, color, in English, foreign language, animated, live action, musical, comedy, fairy tale and more. Popcorn and soda will be available, as well as BCR credit!

 

Wednesday, April 15 at 7:30 PM: Harold and Maude (1971), directed by Hal Ashby and starring Bud Cort

 

No director better exemplified the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s than Hal Ashby, who began his string of wide-ranging and oddball hits with the cult classic Harold and Maude. Starring Bud Cort as a death-obsessed teenage boy and Ruth Gordon as a lively octogenarian, to boil it down to a May - December romance between a mismatched couple would be selling it short. A sort of wake for the idealism of the 1960s, the film also works as a transition between eras, classes, and ways of thinking, all with the eccentric characters and iconic needle drops that Wes Anderson and others would later emulate. While a classic black comedy with a darkness at its center, it's ultimately a film about being in love with life and the larger world outside ourselves.