Friday and Saturday, October 1 and 2 at Pacific Film Archive

The Pacific Film Archive is pleased to present three feature films and a program of shorts by a Swedish director whom The Village Voice called "a slapstick Ingmar Bergman." Andersson's droll, deadpan films, created with no camera movement, and no cutting within scenes, offer amusing and unsettling critiques of capitalist society. Included in the series is Songs from the Second Floor (2000, winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize), a series of meticulous tableaux of the darkly comic side of Swedish life at the dawn of the millennium. A Swedish Love Story, Andersson's first feature, was made when he was 24 years old, and won the Best Film at the 1970 Berlin Film Festival; it contrasts the sweet charms of young love with off-kilter alienation in the lives of adults. Gilliap is a delightful, visually pared-down saga of a hotel scullery worker who decides to create "an American-style gangster syndicate." Andersson is also lauded (by Ingmar Bergman, among others) for his short films and commercials, some of which were disowned for being "too dark" by those who had commissioned them; Andersson's World of Glory was named by the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival as one of the top ten shorts of all time.

All programs will be shown in the PFA Theater, located at 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street on the southern edge of the UC Berkeley campus. General admission is $8 for one program, and $10 for double bills. Tickets can be purchased by telephoning (510) 642-5249; in the Bancroft Way lobby of the Berkeley Art Museum from 11 am to 5 pm; and Tuesday through Sunday evenings at the PFA Theater.

Click for series schedule. For further program or ticket information, please phone (510) 642-1412.