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The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque screened its first-ever film in July 1985, and moved to its permanent home in August 1986. So, is the Cinematheque’s 25th anniversary in 2010 or 2011? The answer, of course, is both! So we’re launching a year-long anniversary celebration featuring a variety of special films, events, and guests. Stay tuned to the Cinematheque blog for the latest details, or email cinema@cia.edu to sign up for the weekly Cinematheque e-newsletter.

Special offsite event: 25th Anniversary screening
On Tuesday, July 13 at 7pm, the Cinematheque returns to the venue where it all started: Strosacker Auditorium on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. (Strosacker Auditorium is located on the CWRU Quad between Adelbert Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Free parking will be available after 6 pm in CWRU lot 1A, which you enter from northbound MLK at the light between Cedar and Euclid Avenue. Walk up the stairs and across the Quad to Strosacker.) The first movie we presented back in 1985 was the Cleveland premiere of Bertrand Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation, a 1980 French film starring Nathalie Baye. Twenty-five years later, we present the Cleveland premiere of Two in the Wave, a new documentary about two other French directors with whom Nathalie Baye worked: François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. We’re charging 1985 Cinematheque prices ($3.50, students $2) to this show!

Signature film series begins July 29: “The Silver (Anniversary) Screen”
The celebration’s first special film (aside from the 7/14 movie at CWRU) will be the unknown silent version of the Oscar-winning 1930 antiwar masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. We will show that in a newly-preserved 35mm print from the Library of Congress on Thursday, July 29. This movie will inaugurate an irregular 14-month series titled “The Silver (Anniversary) Screen.” In it we will showcase rarely-revived movies that we have long wanted to screen.

Anniversary Weekend: August 6-8
August 8 marks the 24th anniversary of the first Cinematheque film shown at the Cleveland Institute of Art. To commemorate the occasion, we present a weekend of special attractions: the Cleveland premiere of a new love letter to the movies; a famous film classic and a forgotten one, newly rediscovered; and a sneak preview of a new, award-winning French crime epic.

Silver Anniversary by the Numbers
By our count, the Cinematheque has screened 6,205 different feature films during the past 25 years. And 3,097 of them were exclusive Cleveland-area premieres. How many of them did you see?