This nail-biting cult classic is widely considered one of the most beautiful and intense films of the 1980s.
Intro by PSU Film Professor Dustin Morrow
Michael Mann writes, produces, directs and edits his own films. He has a hand in the costuming, the art direction, and the cinematography. Mann’s films demonstrate a cinema of control – he obsesses over every single frame. No contemporary filmmaker over the last two decades has more delicately straddled the line between mainstream big-budget blockbusters and personal, art-house films. Mann’s psyche is always front-and-center in his films, questioning masculinity, professionalism, bureaucracies, authority, corruption, and the roles that modern man is expected to play in society. His films are simultaneously authentic and dreamlike, deliberate, surreal and stylized. Mann is a filmmaker of fierce vision, an original and influential voice in contemporary cinema. On May 7th, the Hollywood Theater, in partnership with the Portland State University Film Program, will present a screening of the film many consider to be Mann’s masterpiece, Manhunter. An adaptation of Thomas Harris’s bestseller Red Dragon, and the first film to introduce the character of Hannibal Lector, Manhunter follows FBI profiler William Petersen as he attempts to track down a vicious serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy.