October 16-31 at The Pacific Film Archive

The Pacific Film Archive is located at:
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720

Tickets:
$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)
$4 for same-day second screening

Call 510.643.2179 for information and
510.642.5249 for tickets

See http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/calendar/month/10012010 for more on this month's programming

Saturday, October 16
Special Events: Home Movie Day
11:00 Home Movie Day Check-in 
1:00Home Movie Day Screening 

Home Movie Makers in person. Hop on your bike, take a train, or hit the beach with this compilation of home-movie travelogues from the famous and the next-door, starring Lon Chaney, James Broughton, and you, the audience. Gathered from the PFA Collection and audience submissions! (c. 180 mins)

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area
6:00Stories Untold 
George Kuchar, Chip Lord, and Anne McGuire in person. It’s not just the tale, but how it’s told that’s investigated in this collection of satiric, sensual, and striking stories. Works by James Broughton, Curt McDowell, George Kuchar, Chip Lord, Anne McGuire, Max Almy, and Scott Stark. (95 mins)

8:30The Erotic Exotic 
Introduced by Eric Schaefer. Alice Anne Parker in person. Post-Summer of Love, many experimental filmmakers turned to investigating the body as erotic object and to liberating sexuality—especially female sexuality—from taboo. Works by Alice Anne Parker Severson, Scott Bartlett, Karen Johnson, and more. (85 mins)

Sunday, October 17
Shakespeare on Screen
4:00Romeo + Juliet 
Baz Luhrmann (U.S., 1996). Leonardo diCaprio and Claire Danes are the two star-crossed lovers in this delightfully over-the-top, mid-‘90s beach-culture vision of Shakespeare, complete with souped-up roadsters, tattoos, Radiohead, and drag queens. From the director of Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge. “Shakespeare has never been this sexy on-screen.”—Rolling Stone (120 mins)

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area
6:30Procession of the Image Processors 
Artists in person. Live video synthesis performance with Skip Sweeney, Warner Jepson, and Robert Pacelli. Processors, video synthesizers, and television modulators fuel this program of image manipulators, syntho-sorcerers, and feedback fanatics. Works by Hy Hirsh, Skip Sweeney, Loren Sears, Stephen Beck, and more. (100 mins)

Tuesday, October 19
Special Events
7:00Metropolis 
Fritz Lang (Germany, 1926). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. The newly discovered, 25-minutes-longer print of Fritz Lang's gorgeous, dystopian classic, "a crazed, pathetic ballet of mechanized ant-man in revolt against his Utopian overlords."—Monthly Film Bulletin (148 mins)

Wednesday, October 20
Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area
7:301969-79 
The experimental turns personal in this collection of vibrant, comic, and transgressive works from the seventies, including pieces by George Kuchar, Barbara Hammer, Freude, Bruce Conner, and others. (97 mins)

Thursday, October 20
Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro
7:00Come and Go 
João César Monteiro (Portugal, 2003). Monteiro’s last film, a blissful merging of sunny Lisbon parks, dark rooms, conversations, arguments, and inappropriate sexual obsession. “A wave goodbye, with the middle finger extended.”—James Quandt. “A quintessential Monteiro film, which means it is as idiosyncratic as a William Burroughs novel.”—Screen Daily. (175 mins)

Friday, October 22
Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism
7:00The Bicycle Thief 
Vittorio De Sica (Italy, 1948). De Sica’s masterpiece of a father and son looking for their stolen bicycle is considered one of the greatest films ever made. “An allegory at once timeless and topical.”—Village Voice. Repeated on October 23. (93 mins)

9:00Bitter Rice
Giuseppe De Santis (Italy, 1949). This little-seen postwar gem filters a neorealist call for workers’ rights through the aesthetics of film noir. Vittorio Gassman is a thief whose girlfriend hides out with itinerant rice workers, and becomes awakened to the workers’ plight. (109 mins)

Saturday, October 23
Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism
6:30The Bicycle Thief 
Vittorio De Sica (Italy, 1948). De Sica’s masterpiece of a father and son looking for their stolen bicycle is considered one of the greatest films ever made. “An allegory at once timeless and topical.”—Village Voice. (93 mins)

Shakespeare on Screen
8:30King Lear 
Grigori Kozintsev (U.S.S.R., 1970). Pioneering Russian director Kozintsev (New Babylon; Devil’s Wheel) returns Shakespeare to the harsh, barren natural world in this windswept, stark CinemaScope epic. Adapted by Boris Pasternak; music by Shostakovich. (140 mins)

Sunday, October 24
Shakespeare on Screen
4:00Antony and Cleopatra 
Charlton Heston (U.K./Spain/Switzerland, 1972). Heston stars in and directs this sweeping adaptation, filmed in Spain and recalling some of the epic scope of Ben Hur. “Impressively mounted and well played . . . a neat balance of closeup portraiture and panoramic action.”—Variety (160 mins)

Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro
7:00The Hips of J.W.  
João César Monteiro (Portugal, 1997). Inspired by a postcard from critic Serge Daney and dedicated to filmmakers Straub-Huillet, Monteiro’s spare tale of a theater director, John Wayne, and freedom re-appropriates Strindberg, Beckett, Bresson, and Pasolini. "A kind of cinephile transubstantiation orgy in which thought becomes flesh becomes celluloid." —Film Comment (128 mins)

Wednesday, October 27
Alternative Visions
7:30Photographic Memory: Bay Area Student Experimental Film Festival 2010 
Artists in person. Mortality, memory, and formal experimentations provide the framework for this program of new experimental works by Bay Area film students. (55 mins)

Thursday, October 28
Special Events: Readings on Cinema
7:00Safety Last
(Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, U.S., 1923). Introduced by Merrill Schleier. Judith Rosenberg on piano. Famous for Lloyd's clock-hanging stunt, this is "a model of comic economy that's also a model of one man's place in the economy."—Village Voice. With short Never Weaken. (104 mins)

Friday, October 29
Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism
7:00Chronicle of Poor Lovers 
Carlo Lizzani (Italy, 1954). Marcello Mastroianni costars in this moving portrayal of an Italian town torn between Communists and Fascists in 1925. Nearly banned in Italy, it won the Special Jury Award ath the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. (108 mins)

Shakespeare on Screen
9:05Macbeth 
Orson Welles (U.S., 1948). Welles restores Shakespeare’s tragedy to its roots in Scots legend with an experimental fusion of the Bard and the B picture. (119 mins)

Saturday, October 30
Special Events: Readings on Cinema
5:00Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theatres 
R.A. McBride, Julie Lindow, Melinda Stone, and others in person. A slide-show and essay presentation on existing or abandoned San Francisco movie theaters, with photographs by R.A. McBride that reveal both the grandeur of their architecture and the everyday details of film exhibition. (60 mins)

Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism
7:00La Terra Trema 
Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1948). Following the struggles of impoverished Sicilian fisherfolk, Visconti "makes compositions of the most down-to-earth reality as if they were scenes from an opera or a classical tragedy."—André Bazin (155 mins)

Sunday, October 31
Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism
4:00Miracle in Milan 
Vittorio De Sica (Italy, 1951). An abandoned child helps a group of hobos save their shantytown from crooked landlords in De Sica’s magical fable. “Accents the positive ideal of human brotherhood in a warm, exhilarating, richly comic picture…recalls the best of Charlie Chaplin and Rene Clair.”—Time Magazine. (95 mins)

Drawn from Life: The Graphic Novel on Film
7:30Swamp Thing 
Wes Craven (U.S., 1982). Horror-king Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) campily adapts the DC comics about a scientist turned into a raging half-man, half-vegetable (and sometimes-lover, whenever busty Adrienne Barbeau is around). “One of those movies that fall somewhere between buried treasures and guilty pleasures.”—Roger Ebert (91 mins)