Films

La réligieuse: (The Nun)

Film - Feature | August 11 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Banned for two years in France for its supposedly excessive attack on the Church, Rivette’s adaptation of Denis Diderot’s famous novel of eighteenth-century convent life became a cause célèbre. Anna Karina plays a young woman, Suzanne, whose parents force her to enter a convent. The institution proves prisonlike and on a deeper level of individual repression, is revealed as an arena for sexual...   More >

While the City Sleeps

Film - Feature | August 11 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lurid dime-novel murder propels us into the film Lang regarded as a personal favorite. Here we move ever farther from the moody lighting and striking camera angles of Fury, and ever closer to implicit expressionism; move from big stars to a B ensemble (Ida Lupino and company, plus Vincent Price) who give it their all. Here the Langian shadows and vectors are convergent plotlines, as the...   More >

Cameraperson

Film - Feature | August 14 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker:  Emiko Omori, Filmmaker, Trashed: The Lost World of May’s Studios

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Kirsten Johnson has been the principal cinematographer on more than forty documentaries. For her, “The joys of being a documentary cameraperson are endless . . . and yet, the dilemmas I face while holding my camera are formidable.” In Cameraperson, she assembles a selection of her footage—whose subjects include a Nigerian midwife, an Afghan boy, and Jacques Derrida, as well as her twin children...   More >

Kwaidan

Film - Feature | August 15 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Breathtakingly photographed on hand-painted sets, Kwaidan is at once a Japanese woodcut writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colors that seem to come from another world. An electronic soundtrack by avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu plays hauntingly with natural sounds—crickets, rain, the cracking of wood, the loud silence of snow. Yet the stories—four of Lafcadio Hearn’s ghostly...   More >

3 Faces

Film - Feature | August 16 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking in his home country, this captivating road movie feels very much like an homage to Abbas Kiarostami. Panahi and his female traveling companion, Behnaz Jafari, play themselves on a journey to a tiny village near the Turkish border, where they are in search of a young woman and her family. “A sly fictional...   More >

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Film - Feature | August 16 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“By 1971, David Bowie had failed to make a mark in either the UK or US pop market apart from the single “Space Oddity.” His fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, changed everything: his music, his persona, and his fame. His self-dramatization as Ziggy allowed him to assume and perform a role that previously he had disdained: a rock ’n’ roll star. After...   More >

Christ Stopped at Eboli: (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)

Film - Feature | August 17 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the mountain village of Gagliano, in the impoverished Lucania region of south-central Italy, a proverb reflects the unchanging nature of the inhabitants’ isolation: even Christ stopped at Eboli, the town at the bottom of the bare and craggy hill. In 1935 Carlo Levi, the leftist writer, physician, and painter, was banished by the Fascist government to three years’ exile in Gagliano. His...   More >

And Life Goes On...: (Zendegi va digar hich),(Life and Nothing More)

Film - Feature | August 17 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran that killed some fifty thousand people, Kiarostami returned to the setting of Where Is the Friend’s Home? seeking to find out the fate of his nonprofessional child stars. In the devastated landscape, expecting to find death, Kiarostami found life, and proceeded to transform it into cinema. A filmmaker and his son go along the destroyed...   More >

Day for Night: (La nuit américaine)

Film - Feature | August 17 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Truffaut gives us a behind-the-scenes romantic comedy in which the love interest is moviemaking. Every love affair must have its complications, and so the production-within-the-production is plagued by accidents, erotic misadventures, and wayward performers, including an alcoholically forgetful diva, an imported ingénue not quite over her nervous breakdown, and an uncooperative kitten—plus, of...   More >