Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa will be screened in the Charlie Kaufman films series at The Athena Cinema every Sunday and Monday until Feb. 22
When Emily Beveridge was a freshman at Ohio University, she would watch Charlie Kaufman’s Oscar-nominated Adaptation every night before she went to sleep “for a good period of time.”
“It’s not really even that calming of a movie,” Beveridge, a 2006 alumna and Athens resident, said. “It’s just I loved looking at the new little pieces every time when I was drifting off to sleep.”
Beveridge and other patrons can see Adaptation and Kaufman’s other famed films at The Athena Cinema every Sunday and Monday until Feb. 22 in its series “Tales of Kaufman: A Charlie Kaufman Retrospective.”
Alexandra Kamody, operations director of the Athena, said in an email that she hopes a lot of people, especially students, will come to see the films. She added that the series is timely for his latest Oscar-nominated film, Anomalisa, which starts Friday.
“We like to highlight a body of work by individual directors and in this case, a screenwriter and director, that we feel is particularly relevant,” Kamody said in an email. “We thought students would be interested in seeing the Kaufman films on the big screen and the retrospective seemed timely with the release of the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa.”
Cory Pratt, a third-year graduate student studying film, said he is a really big fan of Kaufman.
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“I feel like because I’m a writer, it makes me like Charlie Kaufman even more, because a lot of times his works centers on writing and the creative process,” Pratt said.
Of all the Kaufman films, Pratt said Adaptation is his favorite.
“It’s a film that’s about the writing process and it’s a very, very interesting look at the inner sort of emotional turmoil that goes into writing,” Pratt said. “It’s made even more difficult by the fact that the main character … is adapting a novel. It’s not like an original work and so he is constantly struggling with ‘Which is the true original?”
The patterns in his films are all very meta, Pratt said.
“That is really kind of what draws me into him as a writer, and because not many people tackle the subject of writing, or at least like this personally or this in-depth as he does,” Pratt said. “It really doesn’t stop at writing either. Like, a lot of his films are just about the creative process like … Being John Malkovich.”
Daniel Telek said he is looking forward to attending some screenings in the series in order to learn more about Kaufman.
“I have a friend who is super into Charlie Kaufman and so I heard his stuff is really good,” Telek, a junior studying English, said. “I think the secret to movies is if you make a good movie, people will see it.”
Out of all of the films, Telek said he definitely will see Anomalisa, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
Beveridge said she had never seen anything like the film Being John Malkovich before.
“It made me look at the world a different way,” Beveridge said. “I guess that’s what good movies are supposed to do is make you look at the world through a different way, and that (film) literally did that, because they were literally looking through the eyes of a different person.”
Kaufman’s films are not feel-good type movies, Beveridge said, but each one definitely ends with a little flicker of hope.
“(After watching a Kaufman film) you’ll probably find yourself feeling good about yourself, like ‘Thank God, I’m not the main character in this movie,’ ” Beveridge said.
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