Rare is it that you're able to witness an event in America's history that is at once surreal and hyper-real — but in tonight's screening of The Great Flood, with director Bill Morrison in conversation with Cinematic Arts professor Mary Sweeney, you'll transcend entropy and time to witness a uniquely American upheaval. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 deluged 27,000 square miles; the exodus of sharecroppers that followed led to a flowering of inner-city life and the propagation of the blues to northern climes. With no dialogue — the images in the film, weathered and withered as they are, speak for themselves — and a scarcity of narrative text, Morrison and composer Bill Frisell have alchemized source material from the National Archives to show an America eaten away by waters that scoured the countryside as surely as any death or revolution. Yet the power of cinema in The Great Flood is, in its way, just as fearsome and majestic as the water that drowned the world that spring. Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108, George Lucas Building, USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex, 900 W. 34th St., University Park; Tue., Aug. 26, 7 p.m.; free with RSVP. (213) 740-0483, cinema.usc.edu.

Tue., Aug. 26, 7 p.m., 2014
(Expired: 08/26/14)

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