The Big Heat | Fritz Lang | United States, 1953
Film - Feature | February 1 | 3:10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
With a lecture from David Thomson
The Big Heat, Glenn Ford gives a fine performance of inward obsession as a police detective who crusades against organized crime and police corruption after his wife is killed by a car bomb.
Tickets required: General admission: $13.50. BAMPFA members: $9.50. UC Berkeley students: $7.50 65+, disabled persons, UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, and 18 & under: $10.50 Special admission applies
Ticket info: Tickets go on sale December 15. Buy tickets online
Sonita: February's Movie at Moffitt
Film - Documentary | February 1 | 7-9 p.m. | 150 D Moffitt Undergraduate Library
Sponsor: Library
Movies @ Moffitt happens on the first Wednesday of each month of the semester. M@M is free.
Film synopsis...Sonita relates the story of an 18-year old Afghan refugee in Iran who considers Michael Jackson and Rihanna her "spiritual parents" and aspires to big-time rap fame. Unwavering commitment to creative self-actualization CAN BE a form of resilience in the face of arranged marriage,... More >
Attendance restrictions: Must have a UCB student ID for entrance
February Movie @ Moffitt
Film Screening: People are the Sky: A Journey to North Korea
Film - Documentary | February 2 | 4-6 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Featured Speaker: Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Filmmaker
Moderator: John Lie, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies (CKS)
Director Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is the first Korean American filmmaker to be given official permission by the North Korean government to film inside its borders. Kim-Gibson seamlessly weaves her own personal story as a native born North Korean, with the fractious history of the North/South division.
Sorrows of the Struggle | (Tristezas de la lucha) | Paz Encina Paraguay, 2014-16
Film - Feature | February 2 | 7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
A trilogy of short films that explores life in Paraguay during and after the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Familiar and Arrival were both made using audio recordings and documents found by Encina in the Archives of Terror—the archive amassed by the dictatorship's police, documenting their own human rights violations from 1954 to 1989. Sorrows of the Struggle, the only fictional... More >
Tickets required: Free for Cal Student Film Pass holders | $7 BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students | $8 UC Berkeley faculty, staff, retirees; non-UC Berkeley students, 65+, 18 & under, disabled persons | $12 General admission
In the Last Days of the City (Akher ayam el madina) | Tamer El Said | Egypt/Germany, 2016
East Bay Premiere
Khalid Abdalla, Maryam Saleh, Hanan Yousef, Laila Samy,
Shot in 2009 and released in 2016, In the Last Days of the City is a personal portrait of Cairo during the fall of the Mubarak regime. Structured as a film within a film, the protagonist is filmmaker Khalid (Khalid Abdalla), who experiences the profound sadness of changes on the city and in his personal... More >
Tickets required: Free for Cal Student Film Pass holders $7 BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students $8 UC Berkeley faculty, staff, retirees; non-UC Berkeley students, 65+, 18 & under, disabled persons $12 General admission
The True Story of Jesse James | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1957
Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Hope Lange, Agnes Moorehead,
As a posse tracks down the James brothers after a botched bank raid in Minnesota, the film sets out to tell their "true story," which, in classic Ray fashion, shows Jesse turning outlaw as a reaction to the humiliation of Southern farmers in the aftermath of the Civil War. Echoing Rebel Without a Cause, Ray called this "a... More >
Party Girl | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1958
Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse, Lee J. Cobb, John Ireland,
Against an obscure, baroquely stylized locale almost arbitrarily tagged "Chicago in the early thirties," Ray creates a surreal atmosphere of exoticism and violence. Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse are well cast against type as a gangland lawyer and a lounge singer/call girl who rebel against an underworld "family" of which... More >
On Dangerous Ground | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1951
Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, Ed Begley,
Ray's study of the vigilante mentality is here personified in one pent-up, brutalizing city cop, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan), exiled to a wintry town where a mentally disturbed killer is being protected by his sister (Ida Lupino) and the townsfolk are out for blood. Lupino plays a blind woman; we hear her before we see her, and the deep... More >
The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri)| Gillo Pontecorvo | Italy/Algeria, 1966
The first European film to treat the explosive subject of colonialism and wars of liberation, The Battle of Algiers probably remains the most powerful.
Too Early / Too Late (Trop tôt / trop tard) | Jean-Marie Straub France, 1982 | Danièle Huillet France, 1982
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed Too Early, Too Late in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt's history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts... More >
The Lusty Men | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1952
Robert Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, Susan Hayward, Arthur Hunnicutt,
The Lusty Men is less a "man's film" than a melancholy and moving critique of masculine values. Ray, in his observation of a complex triangle involving a former rodeo champion (Robert Mitchum), his cowboy protégé (Arthur Kennedy), and the cowboy's wife (Susan Hayward), casts two American prototypes—the itinerant... More >
Film Screening: The Circle (Der Kreis) followed by Q&A and reception with director Stefan Haupt
Film - Feature | February 6 | 6-9 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker/Performer: Stefan Haupt
Sponsor: Institute of European Studies
Stefan Haupt's film uncovers the fascinating universe of one of the first gay liberation communities. Enriched by impressive conversational records with Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp, the film depicts a decades-long love story – made taboo by society – and reveals the couple's inspiring self-knowledge and courage.
The Circle won the Panorama Audience Award and the Teddy Award at the Berlinale,... More >
Film - Documentary | February 6 | 6-9 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: Department of German, Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco
Founded in the early 1940s, the network around the magazine "The Circle" ("Der Kreis") was the only gay organization to survive the Nazi regime. It blossomed during the post-war years into an internationally renowned underground club. Legendary masked balls at the Theater am Neumarkt in Zurich provided 800 visitors from all over Europe with a secret and safe space to act out... More >
Arts + Design Mondays: Collecting the Uncollectible: Pamela and Richard Kramlich in Conversation with Lawrence Rinder
Pamela & Richard Kramlich began building their collection in 1992, a time when collecting primarily time-based works was unprecedented and considered an unlikely pursuit. Since then, they have expanded their collection to include some 300 works by more than 60 international artists. In 1997, the Kramlichs established the New Art Trust to advance the media arts through the support of research and... More >
Tickets required: Free for BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff, retirees; 18 & under + guardian | $10 Non-UC Berkeley students, 65+, disabled persons | $12 General admission
Hippie Modernism Public Preview
Film - Feature | February 7 | 7-10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Explore the politically, socially, and culturally transformative works on view in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at this free public preview while enjoying modular synth instruments from Oakland's Vintage Synthesizer Museum. Get a sampling of transcendent animation at a 7:30 screening of short films by Jordan Belson, the first program... More >
She Started It: A documentary following five passionate, trailblazing young women who strive to compete and thrive in the ruthlessly competitive boys club of high tech startups.
Film - Documentary | February 8 | 6-8:30 p.m. | Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium
Sponsors: CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Student Technology Council, Berkeley Innovators, Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology
96% of venture capitalists are men (1). Women still account for less than 10% of founders for high growth firms (2) and earn only 12.9% of computer science degrees (3). She Started It gives a new face to the image of the tech entrepreneur: a female face.
Join the CITRIS Foundry, Berkeley Innovators, Student Technology Council, and the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology for a... More >
RSVP info: RSVP online by February 7.
She Started It
Film - Feature | February 10 | 4 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
One-Eyed Jacks | Marlon Brando US, 1961
Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Timothy Carey,
Marlon Brando and Karl Malden fill the boots of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett (thinly disguised as "Rio" and "Dad Longworth") in Brando's Freudian epic, dubbed by reviewers "one of the first antihero Westerns." Real cowboys, aging starlets, a twenty-nine-year-old Stanley Kubrick, and the stunning Central California coastline round out the... More >
Tickets: Free for Cal Student Film Pass holders $7 BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students $8 UC Berkeley faculty, staff, retirees; non-UC Berkeley students, 65+, 18 & under, disabled persons $12 General admission
Rebel Without a Cause | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1955
Realizing CinemaScope's narrative potential, Ray effectively tore open the walls of the American home to reveal teenagers wracked by alienation and parents trapped in the cycle of their own ineffectuality.
Medium Cool | Haskell Wexler | United States, 1969
Film - Feature | February 11 | 8:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill,
Shot on location in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Medium Cool examines the use and abuse of journalism in an era when widespread popular protests were increasingly subject to police violence and, more disturbingly, government-sanctioned subversion. Wexler, an Academy Award–winning cinematographer,... More >
Tickets: Free for Cal Student Film Pass holders | $7 BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students | $8 UC Berkeley faculty, staff, retirees; non-UC Berkeley students, 65+, 18 & under, disabled persons | $12 General admission
Spring Art and Film Series: "On the Banks of the Tigris"
Film - Documentary | February 13 | 6-9:30 p.m. | Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life (2121 Allston Way)
Featured Performer: Yair Dalal
Sponsors: Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Department of Music
The film follows Majid Shokor, an Iraqi-Australian, as he discovers many of the classic Iraqi songs from his youth were composed by Iraqi Jews. Shokor then travels around the world, meeting, collaborating, and unifying Iraqi musicians of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faith.
Followed by a conversation/ performance with Yair Dalal.
RSVP info: RSVP online by February 10.
Written on the Wind| Douglas Sirk | United States, 1956
With a lecture by David Thomson
Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall,
Sirk called this "my most gutsy picture"; the director's preoccupations with failure and the horrors of family were rarely writ so large. The myriad dysfunctions of the Hadley oil dynasty are blazoned on the screen in screaming colors and skewed angles, nonstop visual hyperbole declaring the... More >
Tickets: Special Admission Applies: General admission: $13.50 | BAMPFA members: $9.50 | UC Berkeley students: $7.50 | 65+, disabled persons, UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, and 18 & under: $10.50
In the Year of the Pig | Emile De Antonio | United States, 1969
In Restored 35mm Print
Emile de Antonio's Academy Award–nominated In The Year of the Pig makes the case against US intervention in Vietnam using an incendiary montage style. The film "connects the bloody dots between politicians and business leaders, Western imperialists, and puppet governments, using a collage of rare archival footage from the French colonial period, film dispatches from the... More >
Cine Latino: Aquarius
Film - Feature | February 15 | 7-9 p.m. | 105 North Gate Hall
Sponsor: Center for Latin American Studies
2-15 In Aquarius, a vibrant retired music critic (Sonia Braga) engages in a "cold war" with developers trying to evict her from her home.
Attendance restrictions: Note: This film is rated 16+ for references to drugs and some sexual content
Sônia Braga stars in Kleber Mendonça Filho's new film "Aquarius."
Class Relations (Klassenverhältnisse) | Jean-Marie Straub West Germany, 1984 | Danièle Huillet West Germany, 1984
Christian Heinisch, Reinald Schnell, Mario Adorf, Harun Farocki,
Straub-Huillet's brilliant distillation of Franz Kafka's incomplete first novel Amerika is perhaps the most authentically German treatment of Kafka ever made. An ecstatic and haunted fever dream of the United States—the place where Kafka longed to disappear, if only in his imagination—Amerika is told from the... More >
Screening: The Law in These Parts
Film - Documentary | February 17 | 2:30-4:30 p.m. | B130 Boalt Hall, School of Law
Performer Group:
Law Students for Justice in Palestine, Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Sponsor: Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Join Berkeley LSJP for a screening of the award-winning film "The Law in These Parts", which explores the legal architecture of Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows, Jonathan Gordon,
Filmed in Central Park with a cast of Actors Studio professionals and random passersby, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is William Greaves's playful investigation of relationships both in front of and behind the camera. By filming the crew recording and himself directing actors repeating an uncomfortably intimate conversation,... More >
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed) Lotte Reiniger Germany, 1926
One of the world's first animated feature films, Lotte Reiniger's enchanting work uses intricate silhouettes made from cutout cardboard and thin sheets of lead, an animation technique she invented, to enact a tale from The Arabian Nights. The film tells the story of a wicked sorcerer who tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a magical flying horse. What follows is a series of wondrous adventures.... More >
Bigger Than Life Nicholas Ray United States, 1956
James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau, Robert Simon,
One of Ray's least known films is also acclaimed by many critics as his best, featuring James Mason in one of his finest performances. Mason portrays a small-town schoolteacher who moonlights as a taxi driver to supplement his salary. When he begins taking cortisone to ward off the crippling effects of arthritis, his... More >
Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) | Jean-Luc Godard | United Kingdom, 1968
The Rolling Stones, Anne Wiazemsky, Ian Quarrier, Frank Dymon,
The evolution of the recording sessions for the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil" provides the connective tissue of Godard's filmic essay on creation, destruction, and revolution. Interspersed with a series of ideological set pieces, including a pastoral press conference with Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky),... More >
Antigone | Jean-Marie Straub France, Germany, 1991 | Danièle Huillet France, Germany, 1991
Astrid Ofner, Ursula Ofner, Werner Rehm, Libgart Schwarz,
As in so many of Straub-Huillet's classical adaptations, Antigone offers multiple layers of history, time, and art: this 1991 film, shot in Sicily's ancient Teatro di Segesta, stages Bertolt Brecht's post-World War II adaptation of an eighteenth-century German translation (by the poet Hölderlin) of Sophocles's ancient Greek... More >
Isang Yun: In Between Maria Stodtmeier Germany, 2013
In conversation with Dennis Russell Davies, Charles Boone, and Charles Amirkhanian
The Korean composer Isang Yun uniquely synthesized Western classical and avant-garde music with Eastern traditions. His life story is equally distinctive. Today he is claimed by Germany, where he lived in exile; South Korea, where he was born and later tried as a traitor; and North Korea, which he visited in his... More >
Gimme Shelter | David Maysles United States, 1971 | Albert Maysles United States, 1971 | Charlotte Zwerin United States, 1971
The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers,
Deftly combining footage from more than twenty camera operators, Gimme Shelter scrutinizes the ill-fated free concert hosted by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in 1969. The film shuttles in time and space between the offices where lawyer Melvin Belli negotiates the use of the speedway, the... More >
Right of Passage: A Documentary by Janice D. Tanaka
Film - Documentary | February 21 | 7 p.m. | Hearst Field Annex, A1 PFA
Panelist/Discussant: Janice Tanaka, Director
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies
Nowadays, when bipartisanship on Capitol Hill is a rarity, filmmaker Janice Tanaka tells the story of a bygone era of human connection inside the Beltway—an unprecedented "American" moment in the US Congress that the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University called an achievement "against all odds." The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, almost forty-five years in the making, acknowledged the... More >
Registration recommended: FREE
Registration info: Register online
Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | United States, 1958
James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore,
A radical meditation on man's obsession with illusion, Vertigo reflects back on itself as cinema and as a sadly ironic view of romantic love in the fifties. James Stewart was never less "romantic" than in this film; his urgency is frightening and compelling. Formally, and in its deeply... More >
Tickets required: Special admission applies: General admission: $13.50. BAMPFA members: $9.50. UC Berkeley students: $7.50 65+, disabled persons, UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, and 18 & under: $10.50
Spring Art and Film Series: A Borrowed Identity
Film - Feature | February 22 | 5:30 p.m. | Boalt Hall, School of Law, Warren Room
Featured Speaker: Sayed Kashua, Clinical Professor, Jewish Culture & Society, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Chana Kronfeld, Professor of Modern Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Program for Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley
Sponsors: Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
"A Borrowed Identity" examines the struggles of Arabs trying to assimilate into Israeli culture. Based on two autobiographical novels by the Arab-Israeli author and journalist Sayed Kashua, the film was directed by Eran Riklis with a script by Mr. Kashua.
Sayed Kashua will discuss his work following the screening.
Blockade | Sergei Loznitsa | Russia, Ukraine, 2005
IN conversation with Sergei Loznitsa and Critic Neil Young
The subject: the siege of Leningrad during World War II. There are no words, no music, only sounds and pictures of the slowly dying city—Blockade consists entirely of silent footage of this historical event, to which Loznitsa has added an evocative soundtrack of natural sound effects. "Loznitsa has taken a different and imaginative... More >
Three Short Films By Sergei Loznitsa
Film - Series | February 23 | 3:10 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Beautifully filmed, Life, Autumn presents a portrait of a small village in rural Russia, near the city of Smolensk, with its aging population. Despite the shortage of basic necessities, life carries on. In the strikingly visual, award-winning Factory, Loznitsa and his film crew observe the inner workings and rhythms at a factory... More >
Austerlitz | Sergei Loznitsa | Germany, 2016
* Bay Area Premiere
Filmed on the territory of former concentration camps at Sachsenhausen in Germany, Austerlitz (which takes its title from the final masterpiece by the great novelist W. G. Sebald) is an observation of visitors to the memorial sites there. "One of the biggest mysteries of such places is the motive that... More >
Maidan | Sergei Loznitsa | Ukraine/Netherlands, 2014
Structured solely through extended fixed shots filmed over a period of three months, this account of the riots in Kiev's Maidan Square, which led to the ouster of Ukraine's pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, tracks with formalist rigor the trajectory from peaceful protest to violent confrontation. By placing the viewer in the... More >
In the Fog (V Tumane) | Sergei Loznitsa Germany, Latvia, Russia, Netherlands, Belarus, 2012
In conversation with Sergei Loznitsa and Neil Young
Vladimir Svirski, Vladislav Abashin, Sergei Kolesov, Vlad Ivanov,
In the Fog, which was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is an adaptation of a novel by Belarusian writer Vasily Bykov. The setting is 1942 on the German-occupied western frontier of the USSR, where the local partisans are fighting a brutal... More >
Bitter Victory | Nicholas Ray | United States, 1957
Curd Jürgens, Richard Burton, Ruth Roman, Raymond Pellegrin,
In 1942, two British officers in the Libyan desert lead a commando raid to steal secret papers from Rommel's headquarters, all the while locked in bitter personal conflict. Richard Burton is compelling as Captain Leith, a seeming idealist. In the other corner is Curd Jürgens's Major Brand, whose acts of cowardice reflect... More >
Moses and Aaron (Moses und Aaron) | Jean-Marie Straub | West Germany, France, Italy, 1974 Danièle Huillet West Germany, France, Italy, 1974 |
Introduction by Erik Ulman
Gunter Reich, Louis Devos, Roger Lucas,
Acclaimed as one of the best opera films ever made, this adaptation of Schoenberg's 1930's opus represented a labor of love for Straub-Huillet, taking over fifteen years to fund. A camera, a landscape (the Roman Alba Fucense amphitheater), and direct sound recording is all they need to portray the sweeping tale of... More >
Spring Art and Film Series: East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem
Featured Performers: David Broza; Ali Paris
Moderator: Ramzi Salti, Lecturer, author, radio show host (KZSU), Arabic Program, Stanford University
"East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem" documents the realization of multi-platinum, Israeli musician David Broza's dream to record songs in the Palestinian side of Jerusalem with musicians from Palestine and Israel. The unprecedented, 8-day session in the studio of Sabreen, the legendary Palestinian band, features four-time Grammy Award-winner singer-songwriter and American activist Steve... More >