Cinesthesia series returns in full force for 2024

The Central Library-based film series picks up where it left off in 2019 with a 12-month slate that starts on January 17 with “Strange Days.”

As announced November 7 via Facebook, classic cinema and art-house screening series Cinesthesia will regularly return in 2024 to the Central branch of the Madison Public Library (MPL) for the first time since 2019. With the same mindfulness he brought to the series previously, programmer (and, full disclosure, Tone Madison contributor) Jason Fuhrman is looking to “regain the momentum we had before the pandemic,” he tells Tone Madison.

After enduring some setbacks in 2022 that involved technical issues with the projector in the usual screening space, Central Library room 302, Community Engagement Librarian and cinephile Sean Ottosen proposed temporarily moving the series to MPL’s Pinney Branch (at 516 Cottage Grove Rd.). But without the amount of free time Fuhrman was afforded in the years prior to 2020, compounded with the general uncertainty surrounding events, he decided to wait.

“I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about hosting the series so much further away from downtown,” Fuhrman explains via email. But in late June of this year, Ottosen gave him a screening test with the new Central Library projector, and Fuhrman felt a certain longing for a proper revival. “Being in that room again after all that time certainly conjured up some memories, and I realized how much I had missed Cinesthesia”—which had originally started in October 2013 under the drier name “Classic and Contemporary Films for Cinephiles.”

The last time Madison audiences may have happened upon a Cinesthesia event at Central Library was back in early October 2021, when Fuhrman was lucky to host a one-off screening of David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (1984), ahead of the release of the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s remake. (The concluding Part Two was also recently delayed from October 20, 2023, until mid-March 2024 due to WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.)

In sharing a short list of titles for the incoming calendar year, Fuhrman reflects that, appropriately for a library series, “books have always been the starting point when it comes to programming in general, and of course the 2024 lineup will continue along the same vein.” Kicking things off on January 17—Cinesthesia’s new weekday, the third Wednesday of the month, starting between 6 and 6:30 p.m.—is Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995). The prescient tech-noir concerns the intersection of virtual reality and racial injustice (and takes place in a grungy Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve 1999).

February 21 features Spike Lee’s incredible epic biopic, Malcolm X (1992), adapted by Lee and co-writer Arnold Perl from X’s autobiography. On March 20, Cinesthesia will screen Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987), a landmark satire about the typecasting of Black actors in the 1980s American film industry. Rounding out the first quarter of the year’s programming in April—which coincidentally works backwards through cinema history—is Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, released during its titular year. Other titles on the docket for 2024 are holdovers from the canceled 2020 year, including A Face In The Crowd (1957), The Piano (1993), and Election (1999). As of January 10, the full 2024 schedule is live on the Madison Public Library website.

With Cinesthesia properly resuming, the series once again joins a larger set of curated screenings that MPL has continued to emphasize since the Central Branch’s grand reopening in the fall of 2013. (The building’s redesign in itself inspired Fuhrman, as he says he heard the remodel was “less about consumption of media than about providing an interactive environment.”)

A considerable list of Friday events of newer, popular films can typically be found at Goodman (at 2222 South Park St.), Lakeview (2845 North Sherman Ave.), and the aforementioned Pinney. The Hawthorne (2707 East Washington Ave.) and Meadowridge (5726 Raymond Rd.) Branches also host anime clubs on various days, which previously moved from the Alicia Ashman Branch (733 North High Point Rd.).

While Fuhrman doesn’t have any ambitions to cross-promote with those series, he has been thinking since about organizing a book club that intersects with the programming. It’s an idea that dates back to 2015 when he was preparing his usual screening notes ahead of a Cinesthesia screening of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). Fuhrman recalls that he “found cheap copies of the [J.G. Ballard] book online and distributed them free of charge at the screening.”

“I thought it was an edgy and provocative selection initially, but it just ended up being kind of boring. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice for the first book. I guess most people don’t necessarily want to read an entire novel about people who are sexually obsessed with car crashes,” Fuhrman amusingly reasons. For 2024, Fuhrman is ambitiously considering a book-club tie-in with either Malcolm X, 1984, or A Dry White Season (1989). “Ideally, we would collectively read all three books throughout the year and discuss them after the screenings,” he says, anticipating having more information for interested attendees by January.

All considered, Fuhrman’s efforts in curating Cinesthesia speak to his indefatigable passion for moviegoing. (On a personal note, Fuhrman tries to avoid watching anything at home as often as he can in order to see films with proper audiences.) Before the pandemic suddenly curtailed so much event-planning, Fuhrman notes that his series “was really flourishing, more and more people were attending, and we were consistently having these wonderful cinematic experiences.”

As so many regular series have returned to the public libraries and Madison in general, he’s undoubtedly looking ahead. “There are still so many films I want to show and curating this series has always been such a rewarding experience for me. People have been asking me about it for years and I just feel like this is something I have to do, both for myself and the film community,” Fuhrman says.

_{Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to note that Fuhrman once programmed Cinesthesia at Madison Public Library on a volunteer basis, but no longer does.}