Smoke and Mirrors: A History of Denial
Tuesday
Jan 11@7:15pm Lumiere
(second showing Friday
January 14 @5:15pm at
Fine Arts)
Torrie
Rosenzweig
(1999,
16mm, 75 min)
sponsored by SF Bay Guardian
Using
interviews, archival news reels, historical footage, film clips, photographs,
PSAs, advertisements, and various television commercials, SMOKE AND MIRRORS
tells the story of the birth and rise of the cigarette during its "age
of innocence", and explores how the industry dealt with the realization
that their very successful product was also poisonous. When the tobacco
merchants set to work marketing cigarettes in the early years of the Twentieth
Century, they did not know of their product's dangers. But by the 1940s,
the scientific case against the cigarette was mounting, and first became
widely known to the public in the 1950s, a time when over half of the
American population smoked and cigarettes had become part and parcel of
daily life. The seeds of the tobacco industry's denial were planted during
this time, and continued to grow and evolve throughout the century. Today,
the industry carries along with it fifty years of documented denial which
finally is coming back to haunt them.
--Kathleen P. Skillicorn
In Attendance director Torrie Rosenzweig
Contact Torrie Rosenzweig, The Rosenzweig Company, 821 South Mansfield Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036 docusmoke@aol.com 323.938.8213
Animation
The Indescribable Nth
Oscar
Moore
(1999,
9:21 min)
Contact Nicole Ankowski, Character Builders, 1476 Manning Parkway, Powell, OH 43065 nicole@cbuilders.com 614.885.2211