The Deer Hunter

(Michael Cimino, US 1978, 183 min., 35mm)

Memory and Forgetting. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage play a trio of small-town Pennsylvania steelworkers sent to fight in Vietnam. The dangerous and grueling work of the steel mill is pitted against the horrors of war in the first film to address the social and psychological dislocations wrought by the conflict. The Deer Hunter renewed interest in the dramatic epic and invited comparison with previous masterworks by Griffith and Coppola.

Presented in collaboration with the University of Rochester Humanities Center as part of its 2017–18 series “Memory and Forgetting.”