Wednesday night, the Film Studies Department’s spring film series entitled, European Directors in Transit, continues with director Aki Kaurismaki’s Ariel, the second installment of a four part series in Witherspoon Theatre.

The theme for the semester’s series is “mobility.”

“Film is a moving art,” Devin Orgeron, assistant professor of English and co-organizer of the film series, said.

Both Orgeron and Joe Gomez, his co-organizer and professor in English, instruct courses this semester on European directors and Road Movies, respectively. Orgeron has also recently released a book about Road Movies called, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami.

“After [World War II], European directors were especially interested in surveying the damage, physical as well as psychological, and this genre, what we now call the ‘road movie,’ was a perfect container for this sort of contemplation,” he said.

So why “mobility?”

“When you say ‘road movie,’ most of us think immediately of Easy Rider; but Hopper’s film was itself looking to Europe, both formally and thematically,” Orgeron said. “And this thematic obsession with transportation goes back much further to the turn of the century when cinema’s innovators, almost instinctively, turned their lenses to that other technology that seemed to be changing the landscape at an alarming rate: the automobile.”

All four road movies will also be shown on Witherspoon Theater’s brand new 35mm projector. Tours of the projector room are also being offered after each screening.

Another professor of film studies, Marsha Orgeron, introduced last week’s screening of the Michael Antonioni’s film, The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson.

“It’s exciting that the campus cinema has a brand new 35mm projector and we’re the inaugural series benefiting from this purchase,” she said. “We really do have a first rate campus cinema at NCSU, and the fact that they are willing to work with film studies to bring…important films to the student body and campus community is a real boon for the university.”

Tonight’s film will be introduced by Devin Orgeron.

“This series aim to highlight our vexed relationship to the idea of mobility and/or escape,” he said. “It’s corny, but the cinema tells us again and again that, in the words of Dorothy in that famous 1939 yellow-brick road movie, ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.'”