Films

Film Screening: The Sacrifice

Film - Feature | January 12 | 7-9:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Shot in Sweden by Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist, The Sacrifice is set in Tarkovsky country: a vast, airy home on a remote Baltic island whose shores evoke the edge of the world. A retired actor, Alexander (Erland Josephson), finds himself in retreat from the world on the occasion of his birthday celebration, elaborately orchestrated by his bourgeois family. The television and a...   More >

The Crime of Monsieur Lange

Film - Feature | January 13 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Of all Renoir’s films, M. Lange is the most spontaneous, the richest in miracles of camerawork, the most full of pure beauty and truth. In short, it is a film touched by divine grace” (François Truffaut). After a venal, sexually predatory publisher (Jules Berry) disappears, his employees decide to collectivize, building community and commercial success around the pulp Western stories of nebbishy...   More >

They Drive By Night

Film - Feature | January 13 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Raoul Walsh’s atmospheric, realistic depiction of the long haul to livelihood in the Great Depression features Humphrey Bogart and George Raft as two brothers keeping just this side of the white line trying to save an independent trucking business from the hands of anxious creditors. Paid by the load, they go without sleep (and without insurance), stopping only at cafes and watching helplessly as...   More >

The Rules of the Game

Film - Feature | January 14 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Renoir’s masterpiece of ruthless grace, made between the Munich accords and the outbreak of war, history plays as both tragedy and farce. This self-declared “dramatic fantasy” à la Beaumarchais and de Musset etches, in the director’s words, “a rich, complex society . . . dancing on a volcano.” It uses the construct of a country-house gathering, with its shooting party and masquerade, its...   More >

Moontide

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Moontide, Ida Lupino is luminous as the distraught Anna, saved from suicide by pugilistic, hard-drinking longshoreman Bobo (Jean Gabin), possessed of his own haunted history. This darkly poetic proto-noir was the great Gabin’s American debut, but despite excellent performances, compelling production design, and masterful, Academy Award–nominated cinematography, the film was largely...   More >

A Life for a Life

Film - Feature | January 17 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A great yet little-known talent of silent cinema, the theater director and photographer-turned-filmmaker Evgenii Bauer was much in demand for his opulent set designs and subtly lit compositions. Praised as “an artistic treasure” during its release, and starring the incomparable Russian diva Vera Kholodnaya, A Life for a Life follows a wealthy matriarch, her two daughters (one adopted), a...   More >

Short Films of Luis Ospina

Film - Feature | January 17 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Luis Ospina is among the most influential and prolific filmmakers in Colombia. Although influenced by the militant cinema that became prevalent across much of Latin America in the 1960s, collaborators Carlos Mayolo and Ospina incorporated political critique, a sense of aesthetics, and perhaps most importantly, humor. Their iconic Vampires of Poverty, a fictional documentary, satirized what Mayolo...   More >

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory: 70th Anniversary of Al-Nakba Film Series

Film - Documentary | January 18 | 6-8 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Sponsors:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Arab Film Festival

First of a three-part film series presented by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in partnership with The Arab Film Festival on the 70th anniversary of Al-Nakba of 1948.

Memories of Underdevelopment

Film - Feature | January 18 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The Cuban cinema reached full maturity with this classic study of a bourgeois writer who stays in Cuba after the revolution, despite his alienation from the new society and the loss of all his friends to Miami. Based on novelist/screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes’s autobiographical Inconsolable Memories, Memories of Underdevelopment became the first feature-length film from postrevolutionary Cuba to be...   More >

The Rules of the Game

Film - Feature | January 19 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Renoir’s masterpiece of ruthless grace, made between the Munich accords and the outbreak of war, history plays as both tragedy and farce. This self-declared “dramatic fantasy” à la Beaumarchais and de Musset etches, in the director’s words, “a rich, complex society . . . dancing on a volcano.” It uses the construct of a country-house gathering, with its shooting party and masquerade, its...   More >

Woman in the Dunes

Film - Feature | January 19 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The sands of time have not worn away the startling beauty of Woman in the Dunes, nor answered the fundamental questions of identity and commitment the film poses. A young widow lives in a pit-house and is fed by her neighbors; she is forced to constantly clear her pit of the sands that threaten to engulf the whole village. The villagers bring a passing entomologist, who has missed his bus home,...   More >

SENYAS: Deaf culture and life with Filipino Sign Language in Manila: Film and Discussion

Film - Documentary | January 20 | 2-4 p.m. | Hearst Field Annex, Berkeley Disability Lab, Hearst Field Annex (HFA) Room D-1

Speakers/Performers:  Soya Mori; Maria Tanya de Guzman

Sponsor:  UC Berkeley Disability Studies

UC Berkeley Disability Studies will be screening SENYAS, a documentary short film about deaf culture, life, and Filipino Sign Language. Filmed in Metro Manila, it follows the life of a Deaf woman. The film will be followed by short presentations and discussion between Prof. Soya Mori who is a Visiting Scholar at UCB and Ms. Maria Tanya de Guzman who is a Pinay Deaf leader in the Bay Area. ...   More >

The Wizard of Oz

Film - Feature | January 20 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

What better activity for a Saturday afternoon in winter than a trip down the Yellow Brick Road together with Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Woodsman? In a 35mm print that shows off its jewel-like colors and unforgettable music, this true classic has delights to beckon little munchkins and Auntie Ems alike to the theater (just don’t bring your little dog, too). The Wizard...   More >

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich

Film - Feature | January 20 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Chris Marker has crafted a cinematic psalm to Andrei Tarkovsky in this absorbing documentary on the aesthetics, evocations, and sensibilities of one of the greatest cinema stylists of all time. Marker’s cinema essay transports the viewer into Tarkovsky’s films and uses two video shoots—a visit to the settings of The Sacrifice (screening January 12 and 28), and a video edited on Tarkovsky’s...   More >

Outrage

Film - Feature | January 20 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Events in crisis are laid out like cards on a table at the opening of a Lupino film,” wrote Action. This one opens with a signature telegraphed image—a coffee cup slides down a factory lunch counter, pushed by the hand of a rapist. In Outrage, Lupino dissects a rape and its aftereffects from the point of view both of the victim and her unwitting victimizers—the morbid, voyeuristic, “guilty”...   More >

The Crime of Monsieur Lange

Film - Feature | January 21 | 2 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Of all Renoir’s films, M. Lange is the most spontaneous, the richest in miracles of camerawork, the most full of pure beauty and truth. In short, it is a film touched by divine grace” (François Truffaut). After a venal, sexually predatory publisher (Jules Berry) disappears, his employees decide to collectivize, building community and commercial success around the pulp Western stories of nebbishy...   More >

High Sierra

Film - Feature | January 21 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

High Sierra ushered the gangster genre into the forties, and the gangster himself into the role of existential antihero. Humphrey Bogart’s Mad Dog Earle, hiding out in the Sierras following a robbery, is in a no-exit situation that ends in a mountain shootout. Lupino is the hard-bitten cabaret singer who falls in love with him; the two characters are magnetized by their shared status as outcasts....   More >

Dawson City: Frozen Time

Film - Feature | January 21 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Much of our cinema history has been lost, and so the discovery of more than five hundred reels of silent nitrate film, buried for decades under permafrost in a former Gold Rush town, could only be greeted with “Eureka!” Morrison’s film is a beautiful meditation on this rare, often damaged, footage as well as a history of the corner of the Canadian Yukon where it was found. “In addition to being...   More >

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks

Film - Feature | January 24 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This satiric comedy, which ridicules the absurd conceptions of Soviet Russia held by Americans, involves a visit to the USSR by a fearful American and his cowboy bodyguard, who are promptly abducted by hooligans. Directed by Lev Kuleshov, a film theorist and organizer of the pioneering Cine-Lab collective where Sergei Eisenstein (among others) studied filmmaking, the frenetic Mr. West stands in...   More >

Angry Inuk

Film - Documentary | January 24 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Animal rights activists’ campaign to present seal hunting as barbaric is highly successful. Less visible, until recently, is the Inuit response. Throughout Canada, Inuit people depend on seal meat for food and on the sale of pelts to participate in the global economy. Bans against hunting have devastated their economy and way of life. In her passionate, mind-shifting film, Alethea Aranquq-Baril...   More >

Stitching Palestine: 70th Anniversary of Al-Nakba Film Series

Film - Documentary | January 25 | 6-8 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Sponsors:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Arab Film Festival

Second of a three-part film series presented by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in partnership with The Arab Film Festival on the 70th anniversary of Al-Nakba of 1948, one of the Middle East's most defining episodes.

Free Speech and Its Limits: An Unfinished Conversation

Film - Documentary | January 25 | 7:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The First Amendment’s protection of freedom of expression has allowed progressive voices to argue powerfully for tolerance, equality, and social change. But what happens when that freedom is used to express intolerance and hate? Charlene Stern’s documentary Near Normal Man, about her father, Holocaust survivor Ben Stern, illustrates the challenges of maintaining First Amendment rights while...   More >

Letters from Baghdad

Film - Documentary | January 26 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, Gertrude Bell shaped the modern Middle East after World War I, and helped draw the borders of Iraq. With unique access to documents from the Iraq National Library and Archive and Bell’s personal writings, Letters from Baghdad tells the story of Bell and Iraq entirely in the words of the players of the time, excerpted verbatim from intimate...   More >

Memories of Underdevelopment

Film - Feature | January 26 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The Cuban cinema reached full maturity with this classic study of a bourgeois writer who stays in Cuba after the revolution, despite his alienation from the new society and the loss of all his friends to Miami. Based on novelist/screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes’s autobiographical Inconsolable Memories, Memories of Underdevelopment became the first feature-length film from postrevolutionary Cuba to be...   More >

Never Fear

Film - Feature | January 27 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A young dancer finds her promising career threatened by polio in Lupino’s first fully credited directorial effort, a steadfastly un-melodramatic melodrama inspired in part by her own battle with the disease as a teenager. Radiant and in love, dancers Carol and Guy trade show business for hospital routines—and optimism for despair—when Carol contracts polio. Lupino dirties up the typical...   More >

Woodstock

Film - Documentary | January 27 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A young Martin Scorsese pitched in on the editing (beginning what would become a longtime collaboration with lead editor Thelma Schoonmaker) for this influential music documentary on the landmark Woodstock event. While its selection into the National Film Registry may have more to do with the way it captures a sixties counterculture at the height of its free-spirit, anything-goes mystique, it’s...   More >

Letters from Baghdad

Film - Documentary | January 28 | 2 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, Gertrude Bell shaped the modern Middle East after World War I, and helped draw the borders of Iraq. With unique access to documents from the Iraq National Library and Archive and Bell’s personal writings, Letters from Baghdad tells the story of Bell and Iraq entirely in the words of the players of the time, excerpted verbatim from intimate...   More >

Film Screening: The Sacrifice

Film - Feature | January 28 | 4-6:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Shot in Sweden by Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist, The Sacrifice is set in Tarkovsky country: a vast, airy home on a remote Baltic island whose shores evoke the edge of the world. A retired actor, Alexander (Erland Josephson), finds himself in retreat from the world on the occasion of his birthday celebration, elaborately orchestrated by his bourgeois family. The television and a...   More >

A Useful Life

Film - Feature | January 28 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this deadpan comedy of cinema and obsolescence, Jorge (played by Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek) has worked his entire adult life at Montevideo’s Cinemateca Uruguaya. His routine has remained the same for years: projecting films, greeting the same six or seven audience members in line for every show, chatting with colleagues over possible series and deciding what to repair next (the...   More >

Strike

Film - Feature | January 31 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Telling of a factory workers’ strike in czarist Russia in 1912 and its brutal suppression, Strike, in its brilliant mixture of agitprop techniques and comic-grotesque stylization, reveals the influence of the explosively rich Soviet theater in which Eisenstein was involved. In surprise associations—intercutting shots of the secret police with animals, or a massacre with an abattoir—Eisenstein is...   More >

Torre Bela

Film - Documentary | January 31 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A supporter of the revolution that ousted the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, the German leftist Thomas Harlan was inspired by the Portuguese land reform movement to make this documentary on efforts to turn over the large estate of Torre Bela to local workers. “The resulting film remains one of the emblematic Portuguese films of the revolutionary period, and one of the purest examples of...   More >