Date/Time
Date(s) - 20/10/2024
11:30 - 13:45
Location
Electric Palace cinema, 39a High Street, Hastings TN34 3ER
Earthquake + Intro
Various interconnected people struggle to survive when an earthquake of unimaginable magnitude hits Los Angeles, California, in this Academy Award winner. Introduced by Disaster! season curator, Jamie Sellers.
Director: Mark Robson
123 min / 1974 / USA
Famously released in Sensurround, which brought the earthquake experience a little closer for cinemagoers, this 1974 movie imagines what would happen if the big one hit Los Angeles, and follows the individual stories of a number of interlocking characters, including a cross-generational love triangle.
A stellar cast features Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene, Geneviève Bujold, Richard Roundtree, and disaster film regular and all-round hero George Kennedy.
Earthquake won three technical Academy Awards, including Best Sound, and a special award for its impressive visual effects.
About Disaster! Season
This film is part of our Disaster! mini season, a short season curated by Jamie Sellers, celebrating the brief golden age of those blockbuster American movies that used a looming or ongoing disaster as their main plot device, this being roughly a period through the early 1970s.
These movies had A-list ensemble casts of Hollywood stars past and then-present, and directors with an eye for the dramatic. Irony is all but absent – no-one’s tipping the wink to the viewer, everyone’s deadly serious, and quite often very angry too. It IS okay to laugh though, on occasion – in fact, we defy you not to.
Plot devices might feature an arrogant or careless authority figure whose actions (or lack of) are partly or entirely responsible for the unfolding chaos; a blue-collar folk hero whose down- to-earth commonsense ultimately averts an even worse scenario; and often a stupid kid who ignores every danger sign and puts him or herself in grave mortal danger. Warning: it’s the early ‘70s, and chauvinism is not in short supply.
Jamie Sellers is a freelance Music Curator, extreme quizmaster, and occasional singer. He’s been volunteering at the Electric Palace since September 2019. He watches around 250 films a year, and counts among his favourites The Hustler, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ordet. His favourite current directors are Alice Rohrwacher, Kelly Reichardt, Francois Ozon and Christian Petzold.
Book now: https://www.electricpalacecinema.com/whats-on/earthquake
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