Film Series in September

This September @ the Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720
510.643.2197

Theater Admission Prices
Single Feature
$5.50 for BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 for adults (18-64)
$6.50 for UC Berkeley faculty and staff; non-UC Berkeley students; senior citizens (65 & over); disabled persons; and youth (17 & under)
Additional Feature
$4 for all patrons

See http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/calendar/month/09012010 for full film descriptions

Wednesday, September 1
Alternative Visions (Film Series)
7:30 p.m. Optical Poetry: Oskar Fischinger Classics
According to avant-garde film historian William Moritz, “Oskar Fischinger must count among the greatest artists of the twentieth century. His films and paintings achieved the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of younger artists, and providing anonymous models for the music videos and computer graphics of the last quarter of the century.” His work was an influence on Walt Disney's Fantasia and an inspiration for many Disney films of the 1940s. Tonight's program of Fischinger's astounding visual music includes many new and preserved prints.
 —John Canemaker, New York Times

• (Total running time: 75 mins, B&W/Color, 35mm, From Center for Visual Music, in association with Fischinger Archive. Featuring prints preserved by Academy Film Archive, Center for Visual Music, and Fischinger Archive, with the support of Film Foundation, Sony, Cinémathèque québécoise, and Deutsches Filmmuseum)


Thursday, September 2
Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints (Film Series)
They don’t make ’em like they used to, goes the common refrain when talking of classic Hollywood films—and classic Hollywood leading men. Swoon encapsulates the “golden age” of the Hollywood leading man beginning in postwar Hollywood and continuing through the fifties, to the cusp of the sixties. Fortunately all these leading men are now “young again,” thanks to some wonderful restorations, several provided courtesy of Sony Pictures.

7:00In a Lonely Place 
Nicholas Ray (U.S., 1950)
Restored Print!

Nicholas Ray delivers one of Hollywood's most grown-up views of love—and Hollywood—in this bitter, tender, and devastating film, presented here in a gorgeous print. Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a less-than-successful screenwriter whose violent contempt has many targets: industry “popcorn salesmen,” the movie-going public, his enemies, his friends, his lovers. (“Do you look down on all women or just the ones you know?” an ex-girlfriend asks.) When a hatcheck girl is murdered, Dix’s cynical attitude and penchant for brawling make him a prime suspect; his neighbor Laurel (Gloria Grahame, whose real-life marriage to Ray was falling apart while the film was being made) provides an alibi, an inauspicious beginning to an ill-fated romance. In Dorothy Hughes’s novel and the original version of the script, Dix was in fact a murderer; in the final film he is “only” a troubled man. The difference makes the film infinitely more moving, and yet in the end, as Laurel says with knowing sadness, it doesn't matter at all.—Juliet Clark

• Written by Andrew Solt, based on a story by Dorothy B. Hughes, adapted by Edmund H. North. Photographed by Burnett Guffey. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Art Smith. (94 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)


Friday, September 3
Shakespeare on Screen (Film Series)
William Shakespeare has provided plenty of inspiration for filmmakers around the world, and our fall series—copresented with California Shakespeare Theater—offers up some of the most eclectic. Whether respectful or irreverent, set in the modern-day or centuries ago, Shakespeare on Screen presents a dizzying array of global versions on the Bard. To name just a few: a silent take on Hamlet, Laurence Olivier’s magisterial retelling of Henry V, Aki Kaurismäki’s restaging of Hamlet in Finland’s evidently cutthroat rubber-duck industry, a Radiohead-humming Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and a glowering Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. No matter what era, style, or nation they’re told in, Shakespeare’s tales and words will always inspire.

6:30 Hamlet
Sven Gade, Heinz Schall (Germany, 1920)
Archival Print

Bruce Loeb on Piano

We begin our series with two radically different approaches to Hamlet. This version is based on pre-Shakespearean Danish and German sources, and depicts the Prince of Denmark as a girl forcibly raised as a boy in order to succeed to the throne. Nielsen’s performance in the title role is a marvel of expressiveness and restraint as she alternates between adolescent dreaminess and the very real pain of a woman obliged to disguise herself. Behind the pale mask of her androgynous face flash darkening eyes; she is bent on avenging not only her father’s murder, but also her mother’s gender-meddling.—Lucy Laird

• Written by Edwin Gepard. Photographed by Kurt Courant, Axel Graattkjer. With Asta Nielsen, Eduard von Winterstein, Mathilde Brandt, Paul Conradi. (110 mins, Silent with German intertitles and English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Deutsches Filminstitut-DIF)

8:40 Hamlet Goes Business
Aki Kaurismäki (Finland, 1987)

(Hamlet liikemaailmassa). “For every man hath business and desire . . . .” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V). Hamlet as a cynical film noir set in the business world makes sense for our own out-of-joint time. Kaurismäki’s rendition is a resolutely deadpan spoof; visually, a cross between George Kuchar and David Lynch—shot in black-and-white from every conceivable angle, and some we hadn’t conceived of. Hamlet (comic Pirkka-Pekka Petelius), scion of a business concern, is a pouty, vaguely porcine young man, distracted by his malfunctioning appetites and dismayed by the angst of life on this barren reef. He seems oblivious to the power he inherits upon the murder of his tycoon father, but a robotic Ophelia (the delightfully depressed Kati Outinen) is but one of the victims of the treacherous greed that permeates the film. (“Better Hamlet’s fortune should go to you than to some secretary,” Polonius counsels her.) But . . . our fingers on our lips, for we have already told too much.—Judy Bloch

• Written by Kaurismäki. Photographed by Timo Salminen. With Pirkka-Pekka Petelius, Kati Outinen, Elina Salo, Esko Salminen. (86 mins, In Finnish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Finnish Film Foundation, permission Villealfa Filmproduction Oy)


Saturday, September 4
Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints
6:30 Out of the Past
Jacques Tourneur (U.S., 1947)
Restored Print!

In his first starring role, Robert Mitchum is already “Robert Mitchum”: world-weary, laconic, and life-worn, effortlessly masculine yet appealingly wounded, with a boxer’s build and a poet’s (or a drunk’s) sad eyes. Out of the Past is one of the most exquisite and intriguing of noirs, expertly crafted into a complex narrative in which past, present, and future are linked as in a Möbius strip. Mitchum, hiding out behind a small-town identity, is forced to relive his onetime and future career as a private eye when an unresolved case opens up again like a chasm. The film provided the signature Mitchum role: terse and smitten at the same time. Is it love, sex, or a sucker’s game? Jane Greer may be the quintessential femme fatale, but then again, she may not. Her presence (and past), out of the shadows into light and then back again, echoes an obsession with the unknown, the refusal of any kind of sanctuary, that is central to director Jacques Tourneur’s worldview. Preserved from nitrate negative.

• Written by Geoffrey Homes (pseud. of Daniel Mainwaring) from his novel Build My Gallows High. Photographed by Nicholas Musuraca. With Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming. (97 mins, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy Library of Congress, permission Warner Bros.)

8:30 From Here to Eternity
Fred Zinnemann (U.S., 1953)
New Restored Print!

You can take your pick of leading men in this classic eve-of-war film, set in a roiling Oahu army barracks in the days before the Pearl Harbor attack: Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, even Frank Sinatra. While Lancaster could draw most of the votes, thanks to his notorious love scene on the beach with Deborah Kerr it’s Clift who truly heats up the Hawaiian landscape as a moody, hot-headed former boxer who now refuses to step in the ring, with predictably unwelcome results. Lancaster is the well-ironed sergeant who has problems of his own, mainly in the form of his supervisor’s neglected wife (Kerr). Winner of eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actor (Sinatra), From Here to Eternity embodies the magnetic appeal of both Lancaster and Clift: one the old-school, muscular professional of the past, and the other the sensitive, introspective antihero of a new generation.—Jason Sanders

• Written by Daniel Taradash, from the novel by James Jones. Photographed by Burnett Guffey. With Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra. (118 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)


Sunday, September 5
Shakespeare on Screen
4:00 Romeo and Juliet
Franco Zeffirelli (UK/Italy, 1968)
Vault Print

On its 1968 release, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet earned notoriety for casting actual teenagers as the title characters in Shakespeare’s iconic love story. It was the perfect choice for the sixties youth-in-revolt era, an invigorating embrace of the moment’s generation-gap conflicts that won two Oscars and remains for many the definitive cinematic adaptation of the great romance. Olivia Hussey (only 15 at the time), wide-eyed and voluptuous, and Leonard Whiting (16), a lean golden boy with boundless energy, bring to life the star-crossed lovers with a spirited openness and fiery innocence that older, more polished actors would fail to capture—both framed and lit as if Roman gods by a seemingly liberated Zeffirelli. Elaborate Cinecittà sets; stellar supporting acting from stage veterans John McEnery (Mercutio), Pat Heywood (The Nurse), and Michael York (Tybalt); and Nino Rota’s iconic score round out a film that’s true to both Shakespeare and late-sixties pop culture.—Jonathan L. Knapp

• Written by Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico, Zeffirelli, based on the play by William Shakespeare. Photographed by Pasqualino DeSantis. With Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, John McEnery, Milo O’Shea. (138 mins, Color, 35mm, From Paramount Pictures Archive, permission Swank Motion Pictures)

Preceded by
Next (Barry Purves, U.K., 1989). In this delightful puppet animation, Shakespeare enacts all his plays without a word being said. (5 mins, Color, Digital Video, From Aardman Animations).
(Total running time: 143 mins)

Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints
6:45 Picnic
Joshua Logan (U.S., 1956)
New Restored Print!

A picnic—watermelon, games under the Labor Day sun, friends getting together in a small, sleepy Kansas town. Enter Hal Carter (William Holden), a drifter and dreamer whose presence causes cracks in the Americana surface, exposing lives of loneliness and desperate daydreams: a middle-aged school teacher (Rosalind Russell), weary of waiting for her suitor (Arthur O'Connell) to propose; Millie Owens (Susan Strasberg), an insecure and unhappy teenager; her sister Madge (Kim Novak), engaged to the town’s richest man, but dreaming of “true love.” One doesn’t usually associate the use of CinemaScope with such intimate stories, but here the wide screen is filled to the corners with local picnickers, capturing the stifling claustrophobia of a small town community, and underscoring it as the source of the characters’ desperation. And when Madge and Hal fall in love, they seek to escape, to other dreams in other towns just off the edge of the wide, wide screen.—Kathy Geritz

• Written by Daniel Taradash, based on the play by William Inge. Photographed by James Wong Howe. With William Holden, Rosalind Russell, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg. (115 mins, Color, 35mm, ’Scope, From Sony Pictures)


Wednesday, September 8
Alternative Visions
Unseen Cinema (Film Series)
To mark the 10th anniversary of Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941, we present two programs from the twenty-program series. Robert Koehler commented, “[W]hat makes Unseen Cinema essential for any serious film lover is the argument it makes: That long before the post-war period of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas, Americans were experimenting with film form and subject matter. There's no more transparently false idea in film criticism than the notion that everything in cinema has been seen and written about—that there are no new discoveries. Unseen Cinema deliciously, deliriously puts a firm stop to this falsehood.”

7:30 Revolutions in Technique and Form
Tonight’s program features classics of the avant-garde including Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta, “a radical modern masterpiece. . . one of the first American avant-garde films and a forerunner of the ‘city symphony’ films,” according to Posner. Man Ray’s Le Retour á la raison, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique, and Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic cinéma are grouped with examples of early American cinema that exhibit post-modernistic tendencies.
See http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/calendar/day/09082010 for more information

• (Total running time: c. 70 mins, 35mm, From Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, Det Dankse Filminstitut, Library of Congress)


Thursday, September 9
Shakespeare on Screen
7:00 Henry V
Laurence Olivier (U.K., 1945)

Made during World War II and chosen partly for its England-at-war setting and nationalist rhetoric, Olivier’s directorial debut transcended this background through his inspired juxtaposition of stage and cinema, and by the presence of a virtual Who’s Who of British theatrical performers. It opens as a staged performance, with the narrator wondering, “Can this unworthy scaffold bring forth so great an object?” The film quickly answers this rhetorical jab by moving toward another layer of fantasy, stylized matte backdrops and brightly soaked Technicolor capturing a middle ground between theater and film. The world truly becomes its stage, however, as it then leaps toward realism—or fantasy: “real” world location shooting, highlighted by a recreation of the Battle of Agincourt that embraced all the potential of the cinematic medium. For Olivier the film “tells of the unconquerable spirit of the English people.” It was so successful that even the usually jaded critic James Agee wrote, “I am not a Tory, a monarchist, a medievalist, an Englishman, or a lover of war: but the beauty and power of this traditional exercise was such that, watching it, I wished I was, thought I was, and was proud of it.”—Jason Sanders

• Written by Olivier, Alan Dent, based on the play by William Shakespeare. Photographed by Robert Krasker. With Laurence Olivier, Robert Newton, Leslie Banks, Renée Asherson. (137 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM)


Friday, September 10
Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints
7:00 House of Bamboo
Samuel Fuller (U.S., 1952)
Restored Print!

Aided by the double-lock-jawed presences of the Roberts, Ryan and Stack, Samuel Fuller combines two favorite topics, crime and GIs, with this gangster film involving crooked ex-soldiers organizing a syndicate in occupied Japan. Surly military cop Robert Stack goes undercover to infiltrate the cartel, led by the suavely psychotic Robert Ryan, and falls for the Japanese widow of a slain gangster. In the first postwar Hollywood film shot in Japan, astonishing CinemaScope images of Tokyo street life illuminate the backdrop for a new war, one between violent mobsters and vicious cops, with both sides displaying amazing lows in Ugly Americanism. The narrative quickly eliminates any moral ascendancy of cops over robbers, as generalized American thuggery runs riot amid a landscape of racial and cultural difference. “The police are much more violent and disagreeable than the criminals,” Fuller explained, a point proven in the infamous ending: a blazing gunfight set in, of all places, a children’s amusement park.—Jason Sanders

• Written by Harry Kleiner. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. With Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Sessue Hayakawa. (102 mins, Color, 35mm, ‘Scope, From 20th Century Fox, permission Criterion)

Drawn From Life: Comic Books and Graphic Novels Adapted (Film Series)The comic book and its higher-brow accomplice, the graphic novel, thrive on an endless fascination with good and evil, the machinations of modern heroes, and an imitation of life that unfurls drawing by drawing, line by line. The resilient possibilities of plot and picture have given Hollywood the urge to plunder their serial-paneled pages for its own repurposing, with films like X-Men, Blade, or Batman garnering sequels, soaring budgets, and fanatical followings. But how does the two-dimensional comic book adapt when migrating to a medium that thrives on maniacal motion and humans inflating those word balloons? Moving beyond the blockbuster, Drawn from Life presents eight films that plot their own path beyond the original penman’s paper-based vision. When it comes to graphical adaptability, we call it a draw.—Steve Seid

9:00 Flash Gordon
Mike Hodges (U.S., 1980)

Based on the 1930s comic strip by Alex Raymond, this wanky rendering is Star Wars designed by Fredericks of Hollywood, a future that’s all camp and cleavage. The voluptuous cartoon-like setting is further festooned by its Queen soundtrack—Flash, FLASH, FLASH! The mongrel planet Mongo is home to Ming the Merciless (Max Von Sydow), a bald-pated tyrant, draped in crimson drapery with a collar like a TV dish. He gets great reception everywhere except on earth, where his terra technology has induced a flurry of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Hot to stop these unnatural disasters, Dr. Zarkov (Topol) kidnaps the New York Jets’ quarterback, our hero of padded shoulder and surfer ’do, Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones), and his cherubic arm-charm Dale Arden (Melody Anderson), and makes it like Mach 10 to Mongo. This randy rock is filled with oversexed goddesses like Princess Aura (Ornella Muti), boasting zero-gravity couture and off-planet appeal. Luckily, in space no one can hear you moan.—Steve Seid

• Written by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Michael Allin, based on characters created by Alex Raymond for the comic strip of the same name. Photographed by Gil Taylor. With Sam J. Jones, Ornella Muti, Timothy Dalton, Topol. (115 mins, Color, 35mm, From Universal Pictures)


Saturday, September 11
Special Events (Film Series)
Whether hosting authors and artists in person, campus discussions, silent film restorations, old-time music celebrations, or our annual Home Movie Day, the PFA Theater continues to be the place for the campus and local community to come together and access the most eclectic cinema-related live events that the Bay Area has to offer.

Special Events: Berkeley Old Time Music Convention
3:30 Live Performance by Kenny Hall & the Sweet’s Mill String Band
4:00 I Hear What You See: The Old-Time World of Kenny Hall
Chris Simon (U.S., 2010)
Bay Area Premiere
Kenny Hall, Chris Simon, and Alice Gerrard in Person

Old-time fiddler/mandolin player Kenny Hall may be blind, but he sees landscapes and atmospheres in the musical keys he plays. F is the ocean; B#, a cloudy day; D is warm like the Sacramento Valley. You could say whenever he plays his instrument, he evokes a sense of the world—Kenny’s world, a world that is generous, plucky, infectious, and well-weathered. Considered one of the more important practitioners of traditional music, Hall, now in his eighties, has shunned the limelight, preferring instead the joy of unvarnished performance, the backyard shindig, and the chance to pass on the thousand-plus songs he’s mastered. Chris Simon’s bouncy portrait catches Kenny Hall at his best: among friends and fellow players, conjuring a folksy world, filled with cranky wisdom and an embracing warmth like Fresno in June. Sounds like the key of D.—Steve Seid

• Photographed by Simon. (45 mins, Color, Digibeta, From the filmmaker)

Followed by:
Sprout Wings and Fly
Les Blank, Alice Gerrard, Cece Conway (U.S., 1983)
A portrait of then-78-year-old Tommy Jarrell, considered the best of the old fiddle players, whose expressive style was rich with folksy filigree. As an exceptional vocalist and storyteller, Jarrell helped carry forward the ways of regional wisdom.

• Photographed by Blank. (30 mins, Color, 16mm, From Flower Films)

Special Events: Dance and the State in East Asia Conference
6:30 Yang Bang Xi: The Eight Model Works
Yan Ting Yuen (The Netherlands, 2005)
Introduced by Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak, Professor of Theatre and Director of the Asian Theatre Program, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Chen Xiaomei, professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Davis

During China’s Cultural Revolution, fiercely propagandistic productions praising Mao on screen and stage always seemed to coincide with a glorious sunrise, were termed yang ban xi, and they were the only form of art allowed. Eight of the most popular revolutionary operas (essentially dramatic ballets with song) were termed “the 8 Model Works.” Captured on film in gorgeous Technicolor and Scope, their influence was incalculable.—Film Forum

• Written by Yuen. Photographed by Edwin Verstegen. (90 mins, In English and Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Shadow Distribution)

Drawn from Life: Comic Books and Graphic Novels Adapted
8:45 Hellboy
Guillermo del Toro (U.S., 2004)
Mike Mignola, Comic Artist, in Person

Mike Mignola is best known as the artist behind the Hellboy series, but he has also written the mini-series Zombieworld, several Batmans, the Hellboy spin-off B.P.R.D., and The Amazing Screw-On Head, among many others.

When Rasputin (Karel Roden) rends the portal to Hell, out pops a crimson-tinted mini-demon, complete with sledgehammer fist, horns a-plenty, a bit more than a tell-tale tail, and an impish humor. Director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) takes artist Mike Mignola’s infernal comic creatures and tosses them into a fantastically rendered dire-rama of crepuscular corridors, monstrously mannered settings, and tentacled terrors. Following Mignola’s no-bull bravado, del Toro presents Hellboy as a gruff and sarcastic superhero, busily accomplishing his demonic deeds, but always wishing it was easy being red.—Steve Seid

• Written by del Toro and Peter Briggs, based on the Dark Horse Comic created by Mike Mignola. Photographed by Guillermo Navarro. With Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden. (122 mins, Color, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)


Sunday, September 12
Shakespeare on Screen
4:00 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Dieterle/Max Reinhardt (U.S., 1935)
Archival Print

The influential German theater director Max Reinhardt brings together ballet, classical music, literature, and Expressionist art for this generous Hollywood-by-way-of-Berlin Shakespeare adaptation, a fusing of his ornate theatrical aesthetics with the zippy professionalism of Warner Bros., who hired him after his acclaimed 1934 Hollywood Bowl staging of the play. The musical prelude—a magical symphony of playful fairies and lovers in love with love—sets the tone for one of the studio system’s most sumptuous films, and also introduces the work’s other major (and unseen) character: Mendelssohn’s score. Olivia de Havilland (who starred in the stage production) joins a classic Warner Bros. cast of James Cagney (Bottom), Dick Powell, comic Joe E. Brown, and the teenage Mickey Rooney (Puck), while experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger makes his film debut as an Indian changeling prince. “Boasting the most elaborate fantasy sequences of any Hollywood talkie before The Wizard of Oz,” wrote J. Hoberman, “Reinhardt’s Dream is a triumph of vulgarity.”— Garbiñe Ortega.

• Written by Charles Kenyon, Mary McCall, based on the play by William Shakespeare. Photographed by Hal Mohr. With James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland, Dick Powell. (132 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Library of Congresss, permission Warner Bros.)

Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints
6:30 The Hustler
Robert Rosen (U.S., 1961)
New Print!

Even in black-and-white, a young Paul Newman’s vibrant blue eyes sparkle against a thousand pool tables in Robert Rosen’s classic piece of nocturnal Americana, which daringly brought CinemaScope out of the Wild West and Roman epics and into the dirty, nicotine-stained confines of a pool hall. Fast Eddie, brash as only Paul Newman can be, is the raucous prince of the pool halls, hustling all he meets until he’s finally put in his place by the king of the cue, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Tossed back into the gutter, a now-not-so-fast Eddie (helped by his alcoholic flame, Piper Laurie) aims to get back up, one mark at a time. Newman’s sculpted features contrast well with Gleason’s more gluttonous ones, but even more so with the carefully preserved surroundings, which dutifully capture what Gleason called “the dirty antiseptic look of poolrooms—spots on the floor, toilets stuffed up, but the tables brushed immaculately, like green jewels in the mud.”—Jason Sanders

• Written by Sidney Carroll, Rosen, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. Photographed by Eugene Shuftan. With Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Piper Laurie. (134 mins, B&W, 35mm, ‘Scope, From Criterion Pictures)


Wednesday, September 15
Alternative Visions: Unseen Cinema
7:30 The Amateur as Auteur

Amateurs Joseph Cornell, Ted Huff, and Archie Stewart made films outside the limelight of commercial cinema production and distribution. Their home-spun films incorporate a range of avant-garde strategies and techniques, many expounded in Movie Makers, the journal of the Amateur Cinema League. Tonight’s program includes films which Cornell completed, drawing on found footage, and ones edited by local filmmaker Lawrence Jordan according to Cornell’s written instructions. Cornell’s films were rarely shown in his lifetime.

• (Total running time: 75 mins, 16mm, From Anthology Film Archives, George Eastman House, Lawrence Jordan, Library of Congress, Northeast Historic Films)