Disaster Season! Earthquake plus intro at the Electric Palace

Name: Disaster Season! Earthquake plus intro at the Electric Palace
Start: 2024-10-20T11:30:00+01:00
End: 2024-10-20T13:45:00+01:00
Location: 39A High Street, TN34 3ER Hastings, United Kingdom

Schedule

Sun Oct 20 2024 at 11:30 am to 01:45 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

39A High Street, TN34 3ER Hastings, United Kingdom | Hastings, EN

Famously released in Sensurround, which brought the earthquake experience a little closer for cinemagoers, this 1974 movie imagines what would happen if the big one hit Los Angeles, and follows the individual stories of a number of interlocking characters, including a cross-generational love triangle.
A stellar cast features Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene, Geneviève Bujold, Richard Roundtree, and disaster film regular and all-round hero George Kennedy.
Earthquake won three technical Academy Awards, including Best Sound, and a special award for its impressive visual effects.
About Disaster! Season
This film is part of our Disaster! mini season, a short season curated by Jamie Sellers, celebrating the brief golden age of those blockbuster American movies that used a looming or ongoing disaster as their main plot device, this being roughly a period through the early 1970s.
These movies had A-list ensemble casts of Hollywood stars past and then-present, and directors with an eye for the dramatic. Irony is all but absent – no-one’s tipping the wink to the viewer, everyone’s deadly serious, and quite often very angry too. It IS okay to laugh though, on occasion – in fact, we defy you not to.
Plot devices might feature an arrogant or careless authority figure whose actions (or lack of) are partly or entirely responsible for the unfolding chaos; a blue-collar folk hero whose down- to-earth common sense ultimately averts an even worse scenario; and often a stupid kid who ignores every danger sign and puts him or herself in grave mortal danger. Warning: it’s the early ‘70s, and chauvinism is not in short supply.
Jamie Sellers is a freelance Music Curator, extreme quizmaster, and occasional singer. He’s been volunteering at the Electric Palace since September 2019. He watches around 250 films a year, and counts among his favourites The Hustler, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ordet. His favourite current directors are Alice Rohrwacher, Kelly Reichardt, Francois Ozon and Christian Petzold.