When director Stuart Gordon went to college here back in the mid-1960s, the Orpheum Theatre was as much a classroom for him as any room on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
And the unrest he saw in the streets was reflected in the rule-breaking films he saw up on the flickering screen, from “Bonnie and Clyde” to “The Wild Bunch” to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“There was a revolution going on out in the streets, and there was a revolution going on right here on this screen,” Gordon told an Orpheum audience Saturday night at the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival. He and his buddies would often head straight to a friend’s apartment next door after a screening and stay up all night talking about the movie they had just seen.
The streets may be calmer now — really crowded, given the nice weather over the weekend, but calmer — but the challenging films and the post-show discussions continued as the film festival wrapped up its first decade.