CCCC
CONCORDIA - Cloud County Community College will offer a non-credit community education class film study course through the Workforce Development and Outreach Department in February and March.
These classes will meet on Thursdays from 7-9 p.m. in Cook Theatre at Cloud County Community College, 2221 Campus Drive in Concordia. Enrollment is free and open to the public (suggested ages from high school through adult). Brenton Phillips, Dean of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business, will introduce the films and lead a discussion after the movies are shown.
The course is “Thinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Nightmares and Cold War Paranoia Films of the Early 1960s” and examines six influential films in years surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis when tensions were at a fever-pitch between the US and the Soviet Union.
Feb. 9: Fail-Safe (1964) – A mechanical glitch brings the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss.
Feb. 16: Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964): – A “black comedy” that satirizes the absurdity of the nuclear age.
Feb. 23: On the Beach (1959) – The world’s last survivors of a nuclear holocaust await the deadly cloud of radioactive fallout to reach them in Australia.
March 9: Ladybug, Ladybug (1963) – Based on a true story about a group of schoolchildren and their teachers facing an atomic attack alert.
March 23: The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – After the Korean War, a squad of US soldiers who had been POWs begin having nightmares and learn they had been subject to brainwashing by the enemy.
March 30: Seven Days in May (1964) – An Army colonel uncovers a plot by generals, admirals, and politicians to take over the US government when they decide the President is weak.
“Even though these films are 60 years old, they still have relevance. For one thing, even though they may be fictional and sometimes represent their subjects inaccurately, they served then to shake people out of their complacency and to come to terms with what Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling described as ‘what man has deeded to himself,’” said Phillips.
“Today their relevance continues because the threat of nuclear war still hangs over us, especially with Vladimir Putin’s nuke threats against The Ukraine and the West and rogue states like North Korea and Iran driving to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems. And on January 24, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight, the closest to midnight the clock has been since its inception in 1947.”
Future film courses Phillips plans are Screwball Comedies, Film Noir, Courtroom Drama, Military Justice, Science Fiction, and Baseball, as well as Old & New: Classic Films and Their Remakes.