Skip to main content
Carmen Jones film image; group at party

Carmen Jones

70th Anniversary

This event has passed

In the run up to Vancouver Opera’s latest production of Bizet’s perennial favourite Carmen, a chance to hear the music in a radically different setting, in this ground-breaking, controversial film version of the Oscar Hammerstein’s all-Black Broadway musical. An electrifying Carmen, Dorothy Dandridge became the first African-American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her chemistry with Harry Belafonte in his second film role almost burns a hole in the screen. This carnal melodrama further eroded the power of the Hollywood Production Code.

Austrian-born Otto Preminger was reportedly not a fan of the Broadway show per se, but saw in it the opportunity to fashion “a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical,” going back to Prosper Merimée’s novella, the source for the opera. A disruptor by temperament, Preminger produced the film independently, and was able to shirk off the objections of the Production Code chief, Joseph Breen, who complained about the screenplay’s “over-emphasis on lustfulness” and Carmen’s “complete lack of morals.”

The film has its detractors — James Baldwin notable among them — but for Black film historian Donald Bogle, Carmen Jones is “one of the great black films. For many blacks, the film and Dorothy remain alive, passed on from one generation to another, without the larger white culture acknowledging it. What makes it so compelling – and surely Preminger understood this – is that it is a film in which an African-American woman is not only at the center, but she is making her own choices and is in control…”

 

Introduced by Ashley Daniel Foot, Director of Engagement and Civic Practice, Vancouver Opera; and Leslie Dala, Head of Music and Associate Conductor, Vancouver Opera

 

Co-Presented by

Director

Otto Preminger

Cast

Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

1954

Language

English

19+
105 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Screenwriter

Harry Kleiner

Cinematography

Sam Leavitt

Also Playing

The Life of Chuck

Dir. Mike Flanagan
111 min

The winner of the coveted Audience Award at TIFF last year, The Life of Chuck keeps us guessing about what it's up to and where it's going... Trust us, it's a keeper.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Graduate

Dir. Mike Nichols
106 min

In The Graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman, 30 playing 20 with masterly understatement) comes home from college and is surprised to be seduced by the wife of his father's business partner, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft).

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

blur: To the End

Dir. Toby L.
108 min

Now in their late 50s, Britpopsters blur (of Song 2 fame) do a celebratory lap of Great Britain culminating in their first ever Wembley Stadium show in this appealing observational doc. A companion piece to the concert film Live at Wembley Stadium.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Midnight Cowboy

Dir. John Schlesinger
113 min

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are street hustlers on different ends of the innocence / experience spectrum who establish something more than a business partnership in the seedy world of late 60s New York City in John Schlesinger's New Hollywood classic.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema