After a semester-long hiatus, the film-lovers club Obscure Cinema Society is back in action this spring and ready to attract new members.

“Obscure was a huge part of my entire college experience,” said Kat Smith, a senior advertising major, The Daily Orange technology columnist and president of the club. “Especially on a campus that’s so dominated by Greek life, you want an alternative presence a little bit.”

Smith said she met some of her best friends in college through the group, which is dedicated to students who enjoy watching and talking about films that are normally overlooked by mass media and critics.

The club has been a small but close-knit community for Syracuse University students since its inception in 2009 thanks to Renee Reizman and Steven Lutsky. The two became friends while watching cult classics, and decided to create a student organization that would be open to the rest of the Syracuse community.

Eventually, Obscure began promoting at Juice Jam and bringing in lots of students for screenings of cult classics such as “The Room.” The group even attracted Basil Al-Sayed, an SU film student who became internationally famous for his coverage of the Syrian uprising in late 2011.

Obscure didn’t run last semester because of changes within the staff, often due to founding members graduating and working in the television and film industries. Smith admitted the hardest part of running a group like Obscure is drawing in lots of students, since many don’t know much about independent and cult films.

However, Smith said even when Obscure was dormant last semester, more and more people looked for other students to share their interests in movies with.

“There are people that care about it. Even when we were off the grid, people were still finding out about it and messaging me asking about it,” she said. “It made me realize that there still are people who need something like this.”

Smith said producing a film independently is part of the criteria when categorizing a film as “obscure.”

“We have a lot of the big production companies that own most of the movie-going capital in the world. You don’t always get a lot of attention for smaller independent filmmakers, and the really amazing films made on shoestring budgets — or the bad ones — that are fun to watch,” Smith said.

She also talked about the freedom independent filmmakers enjoy and how they often have more room for creativity and originality than blockbuster-type pictures.

Watching cinema in a group setting brings a feeling of a community, Smith said. Talking about movies has become a popular way of connecting with people and expressing oneself, and is often thought of as a good, stress-free way of meeting new people.

“Everybody likes movies, so it’s a nice middle ground for people,” she said. “It was important for me to establish that within the club. You don’t have to know anything about movies to show up.”

The Obscure Cinema Society meets at 5 p.m. on Fridays at Huntington Beard Crouse Hall in Kittredge Auditorium.

Published on January 28, 2013 at 9:18 pm

Contact Vincent: vtloncto@syr.edu