Celebrate cinema in brand-new Bijou

	Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

With help from disco dolls, pink flamingos, and a con artist who wants to be Stanley Kubrick, the campus’s longstanding independent movie house, the Bijou, is offering moviegoers a little pre-Oscars late-winter relief from Hollywood superstars and supersized mall theaters.

Known for its range and variety of films, the Bijou, a student-run theater since 1972, is as busy as ever this winter. Beginning this month, it celebrates both its 35th anniversary and renovated digs in the Hubbard Commons of the Iowa Memorial Union.

As part of the recently completed renovation of the IMU, the Bijou Theater has been entirely redesigned with digital surround sound, seats with cup holders and higher backrests, a new screen, and acoustic paneling.

Lights down, party up!

If you’d like to help the Bijou celebrate its anniversary and new space, head to the University Box Office (first floor of the IMU) and grab free tickets for this Friday’s (Feb. 23, 7:30 p.m.) grand opening dedication and birthday bash.

Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and limited to two per person.

The celebration includes remarks from Marvin Bell—former Iowa state poet laureate and longtime Bijou patron—on “What I Do in the Dark,” a reception with refreshments (including birthday cake), and an exclusive advance screening of Color Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich as the true-life con artist, Alan Conway, who passed himself off as famous film director Stanley Kubrick in the London area during the late 1990s.

Coming attractions

The Bijou is screening six other new releases this month and holding an Oscars party Feb. 25, and has three more new movies lined up for March.

This semester’s schedule includes cult films, short films, UI alumni-made films, and even controversial films—like February’s screening of a provocative documentary whose name fyi’s editors dare not print in these pages and that, according to the Bijou web page blurb, looks at all sides of the infamous word “…from Hollywood to the schoolyard to the Senate floor in Washington, D.C.,” including scholarly interviews about the word’s history and “some of the most famous and infamous film and television clips that feature the word.”

No stranger to controversy, the Bijou in the late 1970s showed Deep Throat to more than 5,000 people who filled the Ballroom in the IMU to view the Linda Lovelace porn classic. Many young students still might go to movies for escapist entertainment, but Andy Brodie, Bijou’s programming director, believes today’s Bijou reaches an audience that loves film and appreciates filmmaking as a legitimate art form.

“We’re proud to offer a venue for thoughtful films and the audiences who enjoy them,” says Brodie, a cinema studies student who shares management of the Bijou with Emily Light, executive director of the Bijou this year and likewise a cinema studies student. “Our goal is to offer our patrons an interesting and diverse mix.”

This spring’s mix of Bijou movies reflects that goal, with everything from a foreign film (the 1959 Academy Award-winning Black Orpheus) to documentaries (including free screenings of Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing) to campy erotica (John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and Disco Dolls).

For the Bijou's complete spring schedule, go to www.bijoutheater.org.

by Gary Kuhlmann