Eyes Wide Open to Film Manifesto

From the Eyes Wide Open to Film Constitution (on file in the Student Activities Office):
Article II: Purpose of Organization
The purpose of EWOF is to encourage engagement with and appreciation of marginal(ized) and fringe
cinema  defined, loosely, as: unconventional cinema not part of the established canon of “great film
art” – cinema that is – in some capacity – underseen and/or underappreciated. The group will endeavor
to do this through sponsorship of film screenings and gathering of like-minded aficionados. (For further
elucidation see addendum ‘Notes on Marginal(ized) and Fringe Cinema’.)
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Notes on Marginal(ized) and Fringe Cinema
Above and beyond the categories of marginal(ized) and fringe cinema, EWOF is committed to
screening films which push the aesthetic envelope, challenge viewers, incite discussion. New cinematic
landscapes are at all times opening up: digital video in the past decade has begun to come into its own
as an aesthetic practice, with cadences and textures unique and separate from those of film; the internet
and DVD/Blu-ray discs have made available movies that would otherwise never have been available to
the desiring cinéaste – and at quality levels rivaling, occasionally superseding, that of the typical
theatrical viewing experience.
Due to their being financed and distributed unconventionally/ineffectively, or because of their being
produced in regions without a significant filmmaking infrastructure, there exist films that are never
available to be seen by US film-goers: marginal movies, rarely seen, lost amidst thousands of others.
Foreign DVDs/Blu-rays and specialty home video distributers, bootleg copies, “rips” of various kinds
have made these films available for the first time – for those willing to search.
There are also those films which live a different kind of 'fringe' existence – those that have been
forgotten, dismissed – marginalized – due to their having been subsumed into certain monolithic
discursive categories: “bad” mainstream movies (widely distributed theatrically, but written-off by both
critics and the public, usually without having achieved acceptable financial returns); “failed” or
“minor” works of canonized 'great directors', etc. EWOF posits that certain such films are worth
reconsideration, consequently an important part of the club's collective project will be screenings of
'recontextualized' marginalized cinema.
EWOF, thus, intends to focus on those films whose continued appreciation – whose legitimacy as
important, valuable works of art – is contingent on their being seen (where they would likely not have
been), discussed, and (re)evaluated by those appreciative of film-art in all its permutations.
Films screened:
The Boys of Fengkuei (9/19)
Following his first three “director-for-hire” pop
A Summer at Grandpa's (9/21)
features, Hou Hsiao-Hsien made – from 1983 to
Dust in the Wind (9/26)
1989 – these six pictures, and thus began to
A Time to Live, A Time to Die (9/28)
establish himself as a director with a distinct
(regional) voice. Notwithstanding limited

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City of Sadness (10/03)
festival play, these films have never been
Daughter of the Nile (10/05)
available in the United States.

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