Films
Sunday, January 20, 2019
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Film - Feature | January 20 | 2 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Lang’s 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 it’s 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 Yorker’s 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 Castro’s 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
Lang’s 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
Nasser’s 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 Egypt’s political history in the modern age, Nasser’s Republic examines the transformative influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) on the Arab world. Through his leadership of the 1952 revolution and rise to power as Egypt’s 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 women—the 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. Nathalie’s 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-hsien’s gentle tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, which seamlessly weaves those three themes into a meditative look at love—or the absence of it—in 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 >
