Adams to Screen Avant-Garde Films

Adams House will open its Explosives B Cabaret tomorrow with the showing of two European shorts.

Two works--"Elegy" directed by Zoltan Huszarik (Hungary, 1965) and "Rain" directed by Jorge Ivens (France, 1928)--will be shown free at 10:30 p.m. in the Adams D-entry basement video lounge. A reception, open only to Adams students and tutors, will precede the viewing.

The films will inaugurate a weekly series of double-features of classic experimental films from the Harvard Film Archives. Beginning next month, films will be shown on Thursdays at 8 and 10:30 p.m. Before each film, the audience will be able to buy espresso, cappucino and cookies at Cafe Gluttony, set up in the back of the room.

"Because it all works in an elitist direction, I wanted some other aspects to make it more accessible," said Aaron Edison '86-88, a member of the program committee. "So there will be free admission and program notes about the films."

"It will be alternative cinema which is just as well," Edison said. "We couldn't fit the crowds that would come for blockbusters in such a small space. We may do Hitchcock later on, but lesser known ones."

Explosives B, a long narrow room painted black, was completed last spring and opened to Adams residents earlier this fall. A group of students, headed by Sarah Dawidoff '86-'87, worked on the room for more than a year, making the patchwork rugs, alabaster lamps, bar and furniture themselves.

"It is not so much based on a concept, except it sort of acquired a Flinstonian theme," said Adams House Tutor Doug Fitch, who helped decorate. "We wanted to attract attention to the colors on the ground, the colors of the light."

An exhibit of radiator-lamps created by local artist Peter Houk is currently on display in the basement lounge. Mark R. Prascak '89, another Adams House resident, plans to stage "The Mesozoic Maids", his Flinstonian adaption of Jean Genet's play "The Maids" in December.

Fitch said the room's design also stands as an acknowledgement of the creators' respect for Harvard Film Archive Curator Vlada K. Petric, senior lecturer of Visual and Environmental Studies, who is helping to arrange the film viewings.

"We want to have eyes like his," Fitch said. "The room is geared to having eyes like his. They will eat you. You have to see for yourself what I mean."

The complete name--Explosives B Cabaret Telly Lounge & Cafe Gluttony Video Institute--comes from the name of a pocket theater which Peter Sellars '80 created in the same room nine years ago. Sellars, who has since directed for the National Theater in Washington, originally named the room the Explosives B Cabaret after a sign he found on a Colorado roadside, now inlaid in the door.