Category Archives: Archive

Mr. Hulot returns Nov. 14

October 18, 2025 – 6:17 pm

Back by popular demand—and perhaps by cosmic design—Jacques Tati’s PlayTime returns to the Lawrence Modern Film Series on Friday, November 14. After the laughs we shared over the summer with Mon Oncle, we couldn’t resist bringing Monsieur Hulot back for an encore. Our first attempt at a film series more than a decade ago began […]

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Lawrence should have a Haystack

October 10, 2025 – 9:46 pm

One afternoon in the summer of 2014, while visiting modernist architect Carol A. Wilson’s home studio in Falmouth, Maine, I mentioned that my wife and I were planning to take a trip up to Acadia National Park the next day. Knowing that I had an interest in modern architecture, Carol said, “You should go check […]

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Come visit My Uncle Aug. 1st!

July 11, 2025 – 12:30 pm

What happens when your charmingly clueless uncle stumbles into the future—and starts pressing all the wrong buttons? That’s the setup for director Jacques Tati’s French comedy Mon Oncle—the follow-up to his masterpiece, Playtime—where the endearingly inept Monsieur Hulot still finds himself at odds with modern architecture, mechanical efficiency and consumerism in postwar Paris. From Tati’s […]

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Film noir meets spaghetti western

March 26, 2025 – 4:00 pm

The premise of Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo Nagaremono, 1966) is simple: a reformed yakuza hitman named Tetsu decides to quit his gang and marry his girlfriend, nightclub singer Chiharu. His boss has other plans. The rest is all bright color, stagy sets, songs, jokes, and a nearly incomprehensible plot. But when the mix is this good, […]

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In Memoriam: Stephen H. Grabow

January 28, 2025 – 9:29 pm

If George Beal, Curtis Besinger, and Eugene George were the fathers of KU’s modern architecture program, then Professor Emeritus Stephen Grabow, who died last week in Bloomington, Minn. at age 81, was its passionate, steadfast defender. Separated by one or two degrees from Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, who strongly influenced the development of […]

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