Films
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Decolonize the Imagination: Future Landscapes with Tosha Stimage
Film - Feature | January 5 | 6-7:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Do you ever imagine that the world could be radically different for generations to come? Future Landscapes is a practical community exercise engaging difficult social problems through dialogue and art. Interdisciplinary artist Tosha Stimage leads a collage and weaving workshop that focuses on imagining the reconstruction of historical, social, and geographic inequity.
Tosha Stimages work... More >
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Science Film Festival: Contact
Film - Series | January 6 | 5 p.m. | Lawrence Hall of Science
Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute
Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS)
During its 50th anniversary year, the Lawrence Hall of Science is presenting a series of inspiring science films, introduced by scientists from UC Berkeley and beyond.
Contact tells the story of a mysterious radio signal discovered by Dr. Ellie Arroway, and the implications of first contact.
This film will be introduced by Dr. Jill Tarter, Emeritus Chair for SETI Research at the SETI... More >
$12
Buy tickets online or by calling 510-642-5132
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Harakiri
Film - Feature | January 9 | 7-9 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Based on the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly (but changing the title character from geisha to noblewoman) and one of the first European films to depict Japanese culture, Harakiri was considered a lost film for decades until it was discovered in the mid-1980s in the Netherlands Film Museum. Intrigued with Asian design motifs and obsessed with authenticity, Lang obtained sets and costumes from the... More >
Thursday, January 10, 2019
The Golem
Film - Feature | January 10 | 7-8:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
This visually astounding retelling of the Golem myth was inventively brought to life through the collaboration of codirector/actor Paul Wegener, set designer Hans Poelzig, and gifted cinematographer Karl Freund (The Last Laugh; Metropolis), whose work here is some of his best. In medieval Prague, a rabbi creates a monster to protect his people from destruction, but the monster, of course, soon... More >
Friday, January 11, 2019
Ikiru
Film - Feature | January 11 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Ikiru is a searing portrait of modern society in which individual will is the vassal to an impotent bureaucracy. It tells of a municipal government functionary, Mr. Watanabe (the marvelous actor Takashi Shimura), who wraps red tape around the most urgent entreaty: a mothers plea for a park where a cesspool now exists. Watanabe is looking at his watch when we meet him, a habitual gesture that... More >

Ikiru
Film - Feature | January 11 | 7-9:20 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Ikiru is a searing portrait of modern society in which individual will is the vassal to an impotent bureaucracy. It tells of a municipal government functionary, Mr. Watanabe (the marvelous actor Takashi Shimura), who wraps red tape around the most urgent entreaty: a mothers plea for a park where a cesspool now exists. Watanabe is looking at his watch when we meet him, a habitual gesture that... More >
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Bicycle Thief
Film - Feature | January 12 | 6 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
De Sicas neorealist tale finds the despair of postwar Italy evident in the faces of its men. Though the film also explores how women cope with poverty, it devotes most of its energy to documenting Romes streets and the depressed, unemployed men who populate them, anxiously waiting for work. One such man is Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), who miraculously lands a job hanging movie posters... More >

Not Wanted
Film - Feature | January 12 | 8 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Last year we paid tribute to Ida Lupino, an actress turned independent producer and director who created problem films of a uniquely hard-edged variety, dealing with such subjects as rape, bigamy, and unwed motherhood, and shot on location with low budgets and a telegraphic film language that put every penny to work. At that time her first feature production, Not Wanted, was unavailable; it is... More >

Sunday, January 13, 2019
Destiny
Film - Feature | January 13 | 1 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Made shortly after Langs mother died, Destiny is the directors most thoughtful and compassionate meditation on mortality (Patrick McGilligan). Inspired by a dream from Langs childhood, the film is a fantasy/allegory set in three historical periodsancient Baghdad, seventeenth-century Venice, and imperial Chinabracketed by a modern-day framing story. Destiny was Langs first film to gain him... More >

Hall of Mirrors: Four Films by Warren Sonbert
Film - Feature | January 13 | 4 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Warren Sonbert (19471995) was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental film before his premature death from complications relating to AIDS. Hall of Mirrors (1966), made while Sonbert was a student at New York University, is a triptych in which each part rhymes beautifully with the whole; it features cameos by Warhol superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga. Divided Loyalties... More >

Ugetsu
Film - Feature | January 13 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
In sixteenth-century Japan, with the pandemonium of civil wars a looming presence in their lives, the potter Genjuro and his wife long to be rich and safe, respectively. But artistic vanity draws Genjuro into the paradisiacal realm of a phantom enchantress. In a parallel tale, Genjuros brother-in-law Tobei, out for military glory, achieves a generals rank for his fraudulent exploitsanother... More >

Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Artists Talk: Masako Miki
Film - Feature | January 16 | 12 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
In conjunction with her current MATRIX exhibition, Japan-born, Berkeley-based artist Masako Miki will talk about Shinto traditions in Japan, how they address questions of boundaries in life, and how these ideas have developed and manifested in her felt sculptures and installation work.

Everlasting Moments
Film - Feature | January 16 | 3:10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Based on the life of Maria Larssonwife, mother, and pioneering photographerEverlasting Moments is a lovingly detailed portrait of a Finnish woman in early twentieth-century Sweden, a volatile place marked by war, temperance movements, and labor uprisings. Married to the erratic Sigfrid Larsson, alcoholic manual laborer and consummate charmer, Maria struggles to provide for her ever-expanding... More >

Workingman's Death
Film - Feature | January 16 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Michael Glawogger (who died in 2014) wondered if, in the digital age, heavy manual labor is disappearing, or maybe just becoming invisible. In this film the megadirector offers portraits of grueling work and fearless workers, allowing us to reimagine what work is and what survival means in the twenty-first century, when its every man for himself, and God has replaced the state. In illegal... More >

Thursday, January 17, 2019
Harp of Burma
Film - Feature | January 17 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A fatalistic elegy for the war dead, Harp of Burma links beauty with a sense of loss, and loss with salvation. Burma at the close of World War II is a no-mans-land, a quiet emptiness where there used to be life. But the Himalayas still move villagers to dream and captured Japanese soldiers to sing in sweet harmony; Burma is still Buddhas country. Mizushima, a harp-playing scout with the... More >

Friday, January 18, 2019
Bicycle Thief
Film - Feature | January 18 | 6:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
De Sicas neorealist tale finds the despair of postwar Italy evident in the faces of its men. Though the film also explores how women cope with poverty, it devotes most of its energy to documenting Romes streets and the depressed, unemployed men who populate them, anxiously waiting for work. One such man is Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), who miraculously lands a job hanging movie posters... More >

Nosferatu
Film - Feature | January 18 | 8:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
In Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau departed from the artifice associated with German Expressionism to invest the natural world with an unnerving incandescence that surpasses any studio-created image. Filming on location, he managed to draw from the jagged profiles of the Carpathian Mountains, and the narrow streets and distorted architecture of a Baltic village, the most horrific sense of all: that of a... More >

Saturday, January 19, 2019
The Gold Rush
Film - Feature | January 19 | 3:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Charlie Chaplin said that The Gold Rush was the film for which he would like to be remembered; it glitters with some of his most memorable nuggets of comedy. In the frozen wastes of the Klondike, where hordes endure hardship in the quest for gold, Chaplin's hapless Lone Prospector takes shelter in the cabin of a hungry giant, who hallucinates Charlie into a startlingly convincing chicken. In... More >

Megacities
Film - Feature | January 19 | 6 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Mexico City has grown so enormous that no one knows where it ends. Bombays population is so dense it cant be counted. Michael Glawogger takes us deep into these and the other megacities, Moscow and New York, telling stories of people struggling at the bottom of the urban food chain. These are the working poor, with jobs that keep them and their families barely alivelike Babu Khan, who sifts... More >

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Film - Feature | January 19 | 8 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Hideko Takamine portrays the consummate Mikio Naruse heroine: high-minded, determined, and out of her element in a sordid world. Here it is the back-street bars of Tokyos Ginza district, which Naruse re-creates in all its busy detail and nighttime poetry. Keiko is a mama-san, or bar hostess, a modern, lower-scale incarnation of the geisha. A widow at thirty, and exploited by her selfish family,... More >

Sunday, January 20, 2019
M
Film - Feature | January 20 | 2 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Langs masterpiece is a terrifying excursion into an urban underworld where it is difficult to distinguish morally between the activities of organized crime and organized law enforcement. Peter Lorre gives his immortal performance as a pathetic child murderer pursued by both the law and the syndicate. In the rigor of its construction, where theme, style, and mood all express a kind of entrapment... More >

Not Wanted
Film - Feature | January 20 | 4:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Last year we paid tribute to Ida Lupino, an actress turned independent producer and director who created problem films of a uniquely hard-edged variety, dealing with such subjects as rape, bigamy, and unwed motherhood, and shot on location with low budgets and a telegraphic film language that put every penny to work. At that time her first feature production, Not Wanted, was unavailable; it is... More >
Workingman's Death
Film - Feature | January 20 | 6:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Michael Glawogger (who died in 2014) wondered if, in the digital age, heavy manual labor is disappearing, or maybe just becoming invisible. In this film the megadirector offers portraits of grueling work and fearless workers, allowing us to reimagine what work is and what survival means in the twenty-first century, when its every man for himself, and God has replaced the state. In illegal... More >
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
The Fallen Idol
Film - Feature | January 23 | 3:10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The New Yorkers Anthony Lane called The Fallen Idol the most tightly drawn of all the collaborations between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed. Lane writes, Ralph Richardson plays Baines, the butler at a foreign embassy in London. The ambassador has gone away, leaving his young son, Philippe (Bobby Henrey), in the care of Baines and the hectoring Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel). The... More >

One Way or Another
Film - Feature | January 23 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
This masterpiece of Cuban cinema ingeniously integrates documentary and fiction to offer an unflinching analysis of the problems of urban life in Castros Cuba and the changes that are coming, one way or another. With the revolution barely a decade old, a woman and a man come to grips with racial, sexual, religious, and class conflicts carried over from the old society. Sara Gómez (the first... More >

Thursday, January 24, 2019
Metropolis
Film - Feature | January 24 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Langs futuristic superproduction is an anxiety dream of urban dystopia expressed as science fiction. Set in the year 2026, Metropolis envisions a repressive techno-oligarchy in which soaring Art Deco towers and overhead freeways mock an underclass of techno slaves ruled by a supertrustee (Alfred Abel), who lives with his collaborators in the paradisiacal nightclub of Yoshiwara. Lang even... More >

Friday, January 25, 2019
Nassers Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt
Film - Feature | January 25 | 4 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
An intriguing overview of Egypts political history in the modern age, Nassers Republic examines the transformative influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser (19181970) on the Arab world. Through his leadership of the 1952 revolution and rise to power as Egypts second president, Nasser challenged Western powers and championed Arab and African liberation. He fought against unemployment, poverty, and... More >

The Mother and the Whore
Film - Feature | January 25 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A mammoth account of three castaways from the sixties and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Léaud is at the center of the maelstrom for nearly the entire three and a half hours as a narcissistic, perpetually unattached cafe denizen who waffles between two womenthe girlfriend with whom he lives (Bernadette Lafont) and a promiscuous nurse he brings home (Françoise Lebrun). The film makes an... More >

Saturday, January 26, 2019
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Film - Feature | January 26 | 3 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Hayao Miyazaki might consider his single greatest work to be not one of his films, but rather the thousand-page manga epic Nausicaä that he labored to complete between 1982 and 1994. In Nausicaä, genetically engineered weapons have burned civilization to the ground, leaving behind the seeds of a new global ecology that has made humans aliens on their own planet. A thousand years after the... More >

Things to Come
Film - Feature | January 26 | 5 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A busy philosophy professor, Nathalie (impeccably embodied by Isabelle Huppert), moves purposefully between classes, lunches with her husband and grown children, meetings with her publisher, and the apartment of her ailing mother, expertly balancing her time. But a series of unexpected upsets forces her to rethink her relationships and herself. Nathalies unspoken grief, fear, and anger are... More >

Cafe Lumiere
Film - Feature | January 26 | 8:15 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Coffee, Time, and Light is the original Japanese title of Hou Hsiao-hsiens gentle tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, which seamlessly weaves those three themes into a meditative look at loveor the absence of itin contemporary Tokyo. Living alone in the city, the strong-willed Yoko (pop singer Yo Hitoto) wanders its streets, coffee houses, and train stations, seemingly paying more attention to random... More >

Sunday, January 27, 2019
The Films of Frank Stauffacher
Film - Feature | January 27 | 2 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A commercial artist, Frank Stauffacher started the groundbreaking Art in Cinema series of experimental and independent film at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1946 to help foster a community of adventurous cinemagoers. The series also encouraged a number of local artists to begin making films, and by 1948, Stauffacher too had picked up a camera, first photographing two films for... More >

Goodbye First Love
Film - Feature | January 27 | 4 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Subtle modulations of emotion and the search for meaning in the face of adversity, themes that recur throughout Hansen-Løves films, are particularly well expressed in her semiautobiographical masterpiece Goodbye First Love. The nuanced coming-of-age story focuses on a young woman, Camille (Lola Créton), and the effects of an enduring teenage love affair. Camilles frustrated commitment to her... More >

Double Suicide
Film - Feature | January 27 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Masahiro Shinodas first film for Japans avant-garde Art Theatre Guild, Double Suicide strikingly reinterprets Monzaemon Chikamatsus famed 1720 bunraku puppet play involving the doomed love between a married paper-shop owner and a courtesan; here, its not just the play that is presented, but the entire presentation of the play. We begin with the kurogo (men dressed in black who traditionally... More >

Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Things to Come
Film - Feature | January 30 | 3:10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A busy philosophy professor, Nathalie (impeccably embodied by Isabelle Huppert), moves purposefully between classes, lunches with her husband and grown children, meetings with her publisher, and the apartment of her ailing mother, expertly balancing her time. But a series of unexpected upsets forces her to rethink her relationships and herself. Nathalies unspoken grief, fear, and anger are... More >
Film Screening and Director's Talk: Watergate: with Academy-Award winning director Charles Ferguson (U.S., 2018)
Film - Documentary | January 30 | 6 p.m. | Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center
Charles Ferguson; Harley Shaiken
Center for Latin American Studies
Watergate tells the comprehensive story of the scandal, from the first troubling signs in Richard Nixons presidency to his resignation and beyond. Crucially, the film also situates Watergate in the context of all the issues it raised many of which, of course, now resonate powerfully with current events.
After the screening, Academy Award-winning director Charles Ferguson will speak in... More >
Watergate: Film Screening and Director's Talk
Film - Feature | January 30 | 6-9 p.m. | Bechtel Engineering Center, Sibley Auditorium
Charles Ferguson; Maria Echaveste; Harley Shaiken
Center for Latin American Studies
Watergate tells the comprehensive story of the scandal, from the first troubling signs in Richard Nixons presidency to his resignation and beyond. After the screening, Academy Award-winning director Charles Ferguson will speak in conversation with Harley Shaiken and Maria Echaveste.

(Image courtesy of Representational Pictures.)
Out on the Street
Film - Feature | January 30 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
During an acting workshop, ten Egyptian workers distill their experiences of injustice and exploitation at the hands of bosses, police, and the court system into a series of vignettes. The resulting film integrates workshop exercises and reenactments, with the men shifting between roles and stories, and with various factory spaces marked out on the floor of the rooftop studio. The filmmakers... More >

Thursday, January 31, 2019
Father of My Children
Film - Feature | January 31 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Inspired by the life of the independent film producer Humbert Balsan, Father of My Children depicts a producer struggling to balance his unflagging dedication to independent cinema with the need for time with his beloved wife and daughters. The film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes, is a tribute to one mans vocation and a bittersweet love letter to filmmaking itself. The chaos and... More >

On Screen: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Film - Documentary | January 31 | 7-8:30 p.m. | 310 Jacobs Hall
Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth revisits the history of the public housing complex of the same name in St. Louis, Missouri. Famous within architectural history as an iconic failure of modernist planning and cited as an example of the inefficacy of public assistance in political circles, the buildings were demolished in the 1970s. The film questions these myths, calling for a more complex understanding of... More >
