IISA Summer Series: America Must Be...

Film - Feature | June 7 – August 2, 2012 every Thursday with exceptions | 8-10 p.m. | 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building

Sponsor: ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California)

IISA presents the Summer 2012 series of Italian Movie Nights: "America Must Be...".   More >

Le Amiche (Italy, 1955): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 6 | 7-9 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The international breakthrough of Michelangelo Antonioni in the 1960s, which made him the world’s most notorious cult filmmaker, also largely overshadowed his earlier films, including this gem, which has rarely been shown in this country. Yet in this tale of desperate upper-class Italian housewives are to be found all of the concerns embodied in the great artist’s later, better-known works....   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Weekend (France, 1967): A Theater Near You

Film - Feature | July 6 | 9:05 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Jean-Luc Godard's scathing late-sixties satire is one of cinema's great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a petit-bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous centerpiece single take of an endless traffic jam, Weekend is a surreally funny and deeply disturbing expression...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Gerhard Richter Painting (Germany, 2011): A Theater Near You

Film - Documentary | July 7 | 6:30 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Gerhard Richter Painting is a strikingly visual document of Richter’s creative process. Filmmaker Corinna Belz and her crew observe the seventy-nine-year-old German artist in his studio at work on a new series of large-scale abstract paintings. Richter’s distinctive technique, one that involves applying paint followed by a major reworking of the material with massive squeegees, reveals the...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

La strada (Italy, 1954): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 7 | 8:30 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(The Road). It’s hard to think of La strada apart from its reputation as a Humanist Classic, what Vincent Canby called “a fable of spiritual redemption,” in which Giulietta Masina’s clownish soul Gelsomina is victimized by Anthony Quinn’s brutish Zampanò and they call it a traveling sideshow. But that’s a good reason to see it again. Behind Masina’s tragicomic masquerade are some of the most...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

This Is Not a Film (Iran, 2011): A Theater Near You

Film - Documentary | July 8 | 5:15 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“This is a moving, altogether original film that weaves together a series of metaphors and draws us into the life of a courageous man. It's a subtle contribution to the literature of oppression, opposition and prison and to the never-ending discussion of art and its relationship to life.” – Phillip French, The Guardian

In 2010, renowned Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon,...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Always for Pleasure (U.S., 1978): Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank

Film - Documentary | July 8 | 7 p.m. |  Tolman Hall

Speaker/Performer: Les Blank

Sponsor:

Always For Pleasure presents festivity as essential to the human spirit. In New Orleans, even a funeral procession ends with a raucous dance—“You take ‘em on out and you boogie back,” explains musician Allen Toussaint. Blank’s camera enters the heart of such jubilant celebrations—with drinking, dancing, and eating in the streets—from St. Patrick’s Day with revelers dressed in green to the Mardi...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1956): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 11 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Le notti di Cabiria). Albert Johnson, the beloved film scholar and teacher who shared many a plate of pasta with Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, wrote: “Fellini has acknowledged (Masina’s) enormous creative intuition, which defined the boundaries between talent and genius. In Nights of Cabiria no other performer could have perfected her work—it is the masterpiece of her collaboration with...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 Bam/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

The Hustler (U.S., 1961): Cool World

Film - Feature | July 12 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Paul Newman swaggered right out of the fifties and into the sixties without missing a beat. Maybe it was his rebellious spirit coupled with a pained yearning that sat right behind his big blues—too bad The Hustler’s in black and white. For this gritty realist rendering, Newman plays “Fast Eddie” Felson, a pool shark from Oakland. Fast Eddie’s got something to prove—well, everything. He seeks out...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

The Leopard (Italy, 1963): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 13 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Il gattopardo). Visconti integrates a family history into a panoramic account of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century Italian unification movement. Revolution informs the most intimate relationships between the aristocrat Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster), his radical nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), and Angelica (the compelling Claudia Cardinale), whose marriage to Tancredi signals the symbolic...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Juliet of the Spirits (Italy, 1965): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 14 | 6 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Giulietta degli spiriti). Juliet (Giulietta Masina), trying on who she will be for her husband tonight, discovers she is nothing. Thus begins, for this diminutive bourgeois housewife, a psychic journey into freedom and the magic of experience, magnificently concretized into cinema by Fellini. Fragmented (literally, by the camera), Juliet is receptive to the seers and Dionysian revelers she never...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Ed Wood (U.S., 1994): Cool World

Film - Feature | July 14 | 8:50 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

21 Jump Street lost its teen idol when Johnny Depp jumped the show for Edward Scissorhands, a role that fit him like a glove. But this restless actor found another role that fit more like a cheap angora sweater when he took on Ed Wood, the biopic of a cross-dressing director of mangled movies. Tim Burton stylishly chronicles Wood’s career as it goes timber in the faint fifties with Ed’s...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

El velador (Mexico, 2011): A Theater Near You

Film - Documentary | July 15 | 5:30 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(The Night Watchman). “El Jardin,” a cemetery in the notoriously narco-friendly city of Cualican, Sinaloa, is a bustling necropolis where the literal spoils of drug trafficking find their resting place. The cemetery is filled with lavish, multistoried mausoleums built by cartel kingpins as tribute to their infamy. Natalia Almada, whose last film, El general, was a favorite at Sundance, follows an...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

In Heaven There Is No Beer? (U.S., 1984): Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank

Film - Documentary | July 15 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Speaker/Performer: Les Blank

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

From the first polka festival in Connecticut to a polka mass in Chicago, In Heaven There Is No Beer? is a joyful, energetic glimpse of Polish American music, dancing, and food. Polka’s folk roots are traced back to Europe, but today it is largely an American phenomenon; one enthusiast describes it as music to keep us happy, with no side effects except the craving for more.

• Assisted by Chris...   More >

Tickets:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), $9.50 General admission

Sandra, Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1965): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Series | July 18 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Vaghe stelle dell’orsa, a.k.a. Of a Thousand Delights). Visconti’s wondrous mood piece is an Elektra story of incestuous passions and family secrets, set in the crumbling Italian city of Volterra. Claudia Cardinale brings her new American husband home to meet her mother and brother on a very particular occasion: a memorial is being unveiled for her father, who died at Auschwitz. It isn’t the...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Barsaat, Raj Kapoor (India, 1949): The Eternal Poet: Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

Film - Series | July 19 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(a.k.a. Monsoon). Newcomers to Indian cinema may be surprised by the sheer beauty of Barsaat’s cinematography, which echoes in equal parts the deep-focus splendor of Citizen Kane and the iconic portraitures of silent-era Murnau. Two city friends (Raj Kapoor, Premnath) find country lovers, with the moody Kapoor chastely romancing one woman (Nargis) and the sleazier Premnath enjoying a “baser”...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

IISA Summer Series: America Must Be...

Film - Feature | June 7 – August 2, 2012 every Thursday with exceptions | 8-10 p.m. | 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building

Sponsor: ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California)

IISA presents the Summer 2012 series of Italian Movie Nights: "America Must Be...".   More >

My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant (U.S., 1991): Cool World

Film - Series | July 20 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

If you needed an actor exuding marred innocence, River Phoenix could go with the flow. At age twenty, he’d already tapped deep currents of fragile and aqueous angst. Phoenix plays Mike, a young street kid whose narcoleptic episodes are like a disappearing act. He psychically zones out of the dreary encounters that mark the search for his long-gone mom. Keanu Reeves, a disaffected joyboy, tags...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Foxy Brown, Jack Hill (U.S., 1974): Cool World

Film - Series | July 20 | 9:05 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Pam Grier is a force of nature, an unrelenting and assertive id igniter. As the lone female action star of her time, she was driven by a fleshy physicality, nonstop aggression, and a wanky wardrobe of seventies kinked-out couture. In Foxy Brown, Grier is an angel of death out to bring down a crime syndicate operating in her ‘hood. She gives better than she receives, blazing her way past pushers...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

The Girl with a Suitcase, Valerio Zurlini (Italy/France, 1961): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Series | July 21 | 6 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(La ragazza con la valigia). With this film, Claudia Cardinale etched her wistful, playful character whose edge comes from the reality that she never knows where her next meal is coming from. Aida, a showgirl, is seduced away from her act by a playboy aristocrat, Marcello, and then quickly abandoned. She pathetically tries to locate Marcello in his Parma villa, only to become the object of...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Aag, Raj Kapoor (India, 1948): The Eternal Poet: Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

Film - Series | July 21 | 8:15 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(a.k.a. Fire). Few Hollywood melodramas are as perversely aflame with thwarted, courtly love as Raj Kapoor’s intense directorial debut, which adds more than a touch of postwar American noir to its tale of doomed lovers and youthful idealists fighting the bleakness of the modern world. A young theater director (Kapoor) remains haunted by memories of a childhood crush (he even calls all his other...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

All in This Tea, Les Blank, Gina Leibrecht (U.S., 2007): Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank

Film - Series | July 22 | 5 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Tea importer David Lee Hoffman travels throughout China—sometimes on foot—in search of handcrafted premium teas. Directors Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht follow this adventurer as he discovers exquisite teas and attempts to overcome bureaucratic obstacles to buying tea directly from farmers. Hoffman is most interested in teas that have been handpicked and carefully dried and heated to create the...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Blue Velvet, David Lynch (U.S., 1986): Cool World

Film - Series | July 22 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Dennis Hopper was the epitome of sixties cool until the big chill set in. His commercial flop, The Last Movie, the alleged follow-up to Easy Rider, put biker Billy on the skids. But he soldiered on, despite the cool reception of his overheated characters in such films as Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish. That is until David Lynch’s color-drenched neonoir Blue Velvet and Hopper’s pressurized...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Open City, Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1945): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Series | July 25 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Roma, città aperta). A wartime bread-riot: Pina (Anna Magnani) stoops to pick up a loaf. “You?” a man asks. “Should I starve?” she says. Then she gives him the bread; he shouldn’t starve either. The raw courage, and raw terror, of individuals caught up in the implicit violence of life under fascism is made explicit in Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. Pina is the pregnant lover of a Resistance...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Boot Polish, Prakash Arora, Raj Kapoor (India, 1954): The Eternal Poet: Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

Film - Series | July 26 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsors: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for South Asia Studies

One of Indian cinema’s first major successes in the West (“a lovely picture!” chirped the 1958 New York Times review), Boot Polish combines Italian neorealism with Victor Hugo-like flourishes and pointed Indian social(ist) commentary in its tale of two adorable orphans dealing with homelessness, the law, and organized begging. Beyond the film’s brilliant musical set pieces, comedic relief, and...   More >

Tickets required

Ticket info: $5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under).

Heathers, Michael Lehmann (U.S., 1989): Cool World

Film - Series | July 27 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Winona Ryder, late of Petaluma, could steal anything: makeup, Saks Fifth Avenue fashion, your heart. Her simple charm could disarm and beguile, almost too cute to be cool. Then she harvested Heathers. As the only non-Heather in the high-school power clique, Veronica wants out. The collected Heathers rule through contempt and conniving—everyone else is so two hours ago. Then she meets J.D....   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Michael Cimino (U.S., 1974): Cool World

Film - Series | July 27 | 9:05 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

It’s a draw: Clint Eastwood or Jeff Bridges, two kinds of cool, one composed, the other, crazy. But the heat’s on in this directorial debut by Michael Cimino, soon to deliver Deer Hunter. Here, Thunderbolt (Clint) and Lightfoot (Jeff) are a couple of hoods setting up a heist in Montana. Thunderbolt got his moniker using a 20mm antitank gun to blow a safe; reckless and randy, Lightfoot is a bit,...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Bellissima, Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1953): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Series | July 28 | 5:30 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Bellissima is sometimes called an atypical Luchino Visconti film in being his most Italian, evoking two distinct, contrasting worlds: the artificial, glimmering one of the Cinecittà studio, and the desperate but genuine one of tenement life. They meet in a mother’s unrealistic ambitions for her daughter. Anna Magnani gives a bravurissima performance as a working-class woman who earns pin money as...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Awaara, Raj Kapoor (India, 1951): The Eternal Poet: Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

Film - Series | July 28 | 7:45 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsors: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for South Asia Studies

(a.k.a. The Vagabond; a.k.a. The Tramp). A plot that spans generations, and includes a love affair across social hierarchies, massive musical sequences, and family tragedies and reunions, all with a socialist-realist script: Awaara has all the ingredients of an Indian film classic; it was even an international blockbuster, famous across the Eastern Bloc, Africa, and Asia (even Chairman Mao was...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

The Seventh Companion, Alexei Guerman/Grigori Aronov (U.S.S.R., 1967): Russian Inferno: The Films of Alexei Guerman

Film - Series | July 29 | 5 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Guerman’s first film, codirected with the more established Grigori Aronov, is set in 1919, when Terrors both Red and White wracked the Russian populace. Imprisoned by revolutionary forces for his bourgeois background, Major General Adomov stands out among both prisoners and guards for his reasoned, reflective nature, even as his more aristocratic prison mates are executed. Finally released to...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

ry cooder group '88 in santa cruz, Les Blank (U.S., 1988): Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank

Film - Series | July 29 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

n Person/Les Blank


Slide-guitar great and world music alchemist Ry Cooder handpicked an orchestra of virtuoso musicians for a brief tour, including accordionist Flaco Jiménez, eccentric pianist Van Dyke Parks, drummer Jim Keltner, and singers Bobby King and Terry Evans. One stop was The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, where Les Blank joined them to film a night of freewheeling music, ranging from...   More >

Tickets required:$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)