User:Sbwinter2/Cinema Interruptus

Cinema Interruptus is the name of a session occurring annually as part of the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. Originated and originally hosted by renowned film critic, Roger Ebert, four two-hour sessions become a process of interactive film analysis following a prior day of Uninterruptus, where the film is played straight through without interruption. During the Interruptus sessions, the film is replayed, and members of the audience call out "stop" in order to primarily share an observation or ask a question, resulting in what becomes a scene-by-scene, or sometimes, frame-by-frame, analysis of the movie.

History
Roger Ebert moderated Cinema Interruptus from 1969-2006. In 2008, he shared an explanation on the programs's beginnings: "This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."

I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them. A couple of years later, when I started doing shot-by-shots at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference founder, Howard Higman, described this process as "democracy in the dark." Later he gave it a name: Cinema Interruptus. Perhaps it sounds grueling, but in fact it can be exciting and almost hypnotic. At Boulder for more than 30 years, I made my way through a film for two hours every afternoon for a week, and the sessions had to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate attendance that approached a thousand." While Ebert was recovering from cancer surgeries in 2007 and 2008, RogerEbert.com founding editor and CWA participant Jim Emerson stepped in to moderate during his absence. Ebert returned for 2009 and 2010, but mainly as a contributor, using his computer as his voice in order to participate. In 2011, Ebert announced that he would not be returning, and Emerson would carry on as moderator.

List of Movies
The office of the Conference on World Affairs (CWA) provided a list of movies which have undergone this process, along with where and when they were presented as the program evolved: