By Freke Ette

With the Oscars^(R) around the corner, I was delighted to see that Amherst Cinema is celebrating the famed awards ceremony with a limited screening of Best Picture Nominees from 1976. 

This film series, which will run until March 31,  offers a unique opportunity for audiences in the Pioneer Valley to see Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Barry Lyndon, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, five bona fide classics of American cinema.

Alex Hornbeck, creative manager and film programmer at Amherst Cinema, explained that local moviegoers will get front row seats to masterpieces that symbolize the energy and creativity of mid ‘70s filmmaking. The nominees featured “one of the strongest Best Picture lineups in the history of the Oscars,” Hornbeck said.

Actors like Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Jeff Goldblum (Nashville) and Al Pacino (Dog Day Afternoon) remain household names.  However, it is the directors, perhaps less famous today, who maintain a significant influence on critics and filmmakers alike.

Four of them ranked in the top 100 directors since cinema’s inception, according to the website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They. Only Sidney Lumet, lodged at 103, didn’t make the cut. 

Hornbeck notes that watching these films at the cinema delivers a unique experience for audiences. Although several of the films are available on streaming platforms, the challenges from internet buffering and inadequate screen sizes mean poorer visual quality and diminished viewing pleasure. 

Additionally, Jaws and Barry Lyndon will screen in updated 4K versions. These restorations involve a process of digitizing, cleaning, color correcting and upscaling older films, optimizing the clarity of both picture and sound.

I’m thrilled with Amherst Cinema’s programming because beyond their entertainment value, I’ll get to meet more of the community, revisit portrayals of American culture from the past, and study how storytelling has changed over the past 50 years.

The most random people show up to watch movies. And for this series I expect a more diverse crowd. From older folks who probably caught the original releases, romantics drawn to the classics, and those, typically younger, who wonder what all the fuss is about. 

How many other places do we get generations gathered together, bonding over a shared love?

It’ll also be exciting to learn more about American culture from the recent past. Watching the individual films strips them of appropriate context. Seen together, their commonplaces are brought into relief.  How exciting to revisit their depictions of mental illness and queer culture, race relations, and national politics. 

The past may be a different country, but the important human questions endure. So how did these films treat them?

Finally, I’m interested in how much we’ve changed as a society. If films reflect culture, then it’ll be a treat to encounter familiar, but distorted images reflected in the mirror. 

Who tells our stories now? A cursory examination shows that, of the Best Picture Nominees in 1976, all five were directed by men and, among them, only Milos Forman wasn’t American-born. 

By contrast, ten nominees are contending for the same award in 2026, spotting a packed field with five foreign-born directors (Yorgos Lanthimos, Guillermo del Toro, Kleber Mendonca Filho, Joachim Trier), including one woman (Chloe Zhao). 

Clearly, representation matters. Yet there is room to appreciate the past. I hope filmgoers take a moment, even if it is one month, to enjoy these films made half a century ago.

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Valley Chronicles: Resurrection

Chinese director Bi Gan’s latest feature, Resurrection, played at Amherst Cinema last week. Resurrection depicts film personified as a human seeking, dreaming, and clinging to life. The character time hops through tales set in wartime, opium dens, and a celebration ushering in the year 2000.

The complexities of human relationships are portrayed in lithe detail, whether it involves suffering, loss, love, desire, violence, greed, deceit, loyalty, and ecstasy.

Did I mention I watched it twice?

I caught the first show on Friday. Five clueless, lonely strangers alone in the dark, charmed by a film that neither relied on an easy reading nor sought cheap thrills. I was drawn to the concoction of convoluted narratives, dreamlike states embroidered with trippy soundscapes composed by the electronic artiste M83.

I returned to the late-night show on Saturday. A larger audience. Now I saw Resurrection as the story of cinema, assembled from five short films, draped in the thriller, heist, and supernatural genres.

While Bi Gan might be known as a daunting filmmaker, critically acclaimed as a visual poet prodigal with his allusions to religious motifs, Chinese history, and global cinema, Resurrection has persuaded me that his craft serves a unique aesthetic sense. Sensitivity to the range of emotion directs his technique, whether he is relying on miniature models for a silent film, fashioning an extended tracking shot with the undead fighting in a club, or embedding a 3D fragment within a feature length film. 

Since it is Lenten season, a short comment on the film’s title is appropriate. 

I don’t know what the Chinese characters mean, but I do wonder how accurate the translation is.

A body without breath can be revived or resuscitated. One may even imagine a form of reincarnation or rebirth. Unfortunately, rebirth, revival, resuscitation, reincarnation are all awful movie titles.

In the Christian tradition, resurrection assumes the presence of the divine in a human body. Given that death isn’t merely corporeal expiration, but also a descent, resurrection is the ascent that reveals a new life—the same, but now perfect. 

I get the nobility of humanity and the transcendence of cinema, but I am puzzled by the ending. Does Bi Gan foresee film in its pure state? 

We haven’t arrived at our acme. As long as humans are crushed by the brutalities of wars and endure miseries from desires that cannot be fulfilled, they’ll continue to hope for a future where the dawn announces freedom and the music is so beautiful our ears can’t even perceive the sounds. 

Resurrection may be intimidating and esoteric, yet those aren’t sufficient reasons to brush it off. With patience, sometimes bewilderment gives way to wonder. We could take a lesson from one of the film’s characters:

“Is the answer to a riddle so important?”

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Freke Ette has lived in Amherst since 2020.