For the past five years, the College of Arts and Letters has been providing the Flagstaff community with a themed movie every Tuesday night in the Cline Library auditorium.

Paul Helford, a senior lecturer at the School of Communication, is the coordinator of the events. He, along with fellow coordinators, conduct extensive research in the choice of theme and selected films.

“The film series began as something we were going to do for the public,” Helford said. “This is intended to be a campus and community film series. I think that it’s a great tribute to how much people love movies.”

Janna Jones, an associate professor of cultural studies and cinematic culture and a frequent film series presenter, said preparation for the introduction requires major organization.

“It’s more than just a movie,” Jones said. “It’s much more engaging — that kind of practice of being in a theater and having that film-going experience with other audience members has been a huge part of the 20th century. The film series helps perpetuate that so that cinema doesn’t die.”

The event draws more than 200 people, but the veteran patrons and faculty members of the series are eager see even more student audience members.

“We would love to see more students come in who are not taking the class,” Helford said. “It’s a university film series, so you want to have some contextual analysis so that when you’re seeing it, there’s something to look for — something to appreciate the film by other than just passively watching it.”

Jon Torn, an assistant electronic media and film professor, said it is critical for students who are interested in learning more about film to engage in public big-screen showings.

This semester’s series, “The Lady with the Torch: 15 Films from Columbia Pictures,” has featured such classic films as Lawrence of Arabia and Five Easy Pieces.

Morgan Coffinger, a Senior Political Science major, took Helford’s “The Art of Communication” course, which studying filmmaking as an art form. She said she took the class for fun, but gained more than she ever anticipated.

“I thought the class would be a breeze,” said Coffinger, “[simply] watching movies every Tuesday night. [That] was not the case. [The class] was thought provoking and exposed me to films I would of never watched before…Five Easy Pieces was genius and All That Jazz was amazing.”

“The series has some unusual and novel pairings between people and movies,” Torn said. “It’s movies on the big screen, the way they were meant to be seen.”

Helford said the series for the Spring 2010 semester will be “Love and War, Costumes and Clowns.”

“It’s four genres: War films, love stories, comedies and costume dramas,” Helford said. We wanted to pick something that has a broad appeal. We wanted to do genres. We came up with the name, and thought this might be a good topic to do.”

For more information on the film series, check out cal.nau.edu/film/.