Every week, posters around campus advertise the next movie that the Deerfield Motion Pictures Club will screen that weekend. In an attempt to introduce the Deerfield Community to classic movies, Alexzandria Chalmers ’13 and Andrew Bishop ’14 founded the Motion Pictures Club earlier this year.
“We felt that a lot of Deerfield students weren’t exposed to classic movies or even modern classics,” Chalmers said. “We thought that if we started a club where people can watch movies we thought were great, we could maybe introduce another aspect of the American culture.”
Chalmers believes that motion pictures hold a special place in our culture. “Film has been around for less than a century, but it has already redefined literature,” she said. “Learning to appreciate movies will do Deerfield students more good than they might initially think.”
Some films that the group has screened so far include Pulp Fiction, Citizen Kane, Slumdog Millionaire, The Big Lebowski and Fight Club. “We take recommendations from parents and teachers that know movies better than we do. We try to stick to those that are widely considered great so that a larger audience can appreciate them,” Bishop explained.
Other officers of the club include Cody Anderson-Salo ’14 and Tabata Viso ’14. “It would be nice to have a greater turnout in our future screenings,” Anderson-Salo ’14 said. Currently their screenings take place on Saturday nights at 8 p.m. in the Small Auditorium.
The officers are still exploring possibilities to improve the Saturday night screenings. “We want to do a mix of modern classics and old classics. Maybe we also want to have more discussion after watching the films,” Bishop ’14 said.