Film Theory – Steven J. Venturino

Appreciating Form in Books and Movies

Published on June 7, 2021July 27, 2021 by Steven J. Venturino

A Newberry Library Adult Education Seminar

This seminar offers a lively survey of some of the artistic techniques, styles, innovations, and traditions that we encounter everyday. Through literary excerpts, film clips, lectures, and discussion, our sessions will explore the importance, in fiction and film, of a good beginning, the depiction of characters’ thoughts and feelings, the effects of patterns and framing, the reliance on “the same old plots,” and the curious nature of representation.

Six sessions. Thursdays, June 17 to July 22, 2 -4pm CDT, via Zoom.

Six Revelations Provoked by Theater-Screening The Wizard of Oz

Published on January 16, 2015May 19, 2020 by Steven J. Venturino

Oh you can say there’s nothing to be gained by seeing The Wizard of Oz on the big screen of a real theater, and you can say we knew all these things before, and you can say a big screen at home is big enough for anything we want to see. But with the principle in mind that knowledge of something from a little picture is different from knowledge of that same thing from a big picture, and in the spirit of refreshing the familiar, here are just six thoughts I had while watching, for the first time in a theater, a movie we’ve all seen dozens of times before.