Indelible Moments: May I Have This Dance

June 12–August 25, 2022

A selection of films in which a dance scene crystallizes the experience of the movie, a moment leaving its imprint more than the plotline or even the characters.

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  • Band of Outsiders

  • Killer of Sheep

  • Beau travail

  • My Darling Clementine

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Gold Rush

    Charles Chaplin
    United States, 1925, reedited 1942

    Free Family Day Screening—Free Admission!

    The original 1925 version of The Gold Rush will be shown for free on the outdoor screen Thursday, August 4.

    Sunday, June 12 2 PM

    A hapless prospector tries his luck in the frozen north in a film that glitters with some of Chaplin’s most memorable nuggets of comedy, including our hero leading a pair of rolls in a graceful soft-shoe.

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  • Casque d’or

    Jacques Becker
    France, 1952
    Sunday, June 12 5:30 PM
    Introduced by Edith Kramer

    A dazzling Simone Signoret is caught between a gangster tough and an honest carpenter in Becker’s “elegant masterwork” (Time Out) set in turn-of-the century Paris. With Pass the Gravy, a silent comedy short with Max Davidson.

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  • Vivre sa vie

    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1962
    Thursday, June 16 7 PM

    In twelve tableaux, Vivre sa vie tells of Nana (Anna Karina) at the brief, flickering moment when she takes responsibility for her life. The ninth episode includes “perhaps the saddest ‘happy’ dance scene in cinema” (Ifan Davies).

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  • My Darling Clementine

    John Ford
    United States, 1946
    Sunday, June 19 5 PM

    In this tender Western, a dance between Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Clementine (Cathy Downs) “is the turning point of the movie, and marks the end of the Old West” (Roger Ebert).

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  • Beau travail

    Claire Denis
    France, 1999
    Thursday, June 23 7 PM

    In this story of French Legionnaires isolated in a blisteringly beautiful African setting, Denis creates “a fixed, timeless world of mysterious, balletic rites, rippled with simmering homoerotic tensions. . . . Prepare to be blown away” (Time Out).

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  • White Nights

    Luchino Visconti
    Italy, France, 1957

    Imported 35mm Print

    Sunday, June 26 5 PM

    Marcello Mastroianni stars in a romantic, sublimely artificial adaptation of the Dostoyevsky story about people drifting along crossing, doubling paths.

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  • Playtime

    Jacques Tati
    France, Italy, 1967
    Sunday, July 3 5 PM

    Tati’s vision of 1960s Paris is “perhaps the most madly modernistic work of anti-modernism in the history of cinema” (New Yorker). And for Tati, “The more the picture continues, the more the people dance” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

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  • Killer of Sheep

    Charles Burnett
    United States, 1977

    New 35mm BAMPFA Collection Print

    Thursday, July 7 7 PM
    Introduced by Ruth Gebreyesus

    A poetic evocation of working-class Watts, “a great—the greatest—cinematic tone poem of American urban life” (New York), Killer of Sheep’s “single most-recalled moment” is “the slow-dance scene between the . . . alienated Stan and his wife” (Adrian Martin). 

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  • Damnation

    Béla Tarr
    Hungary, 1988

    New 4K Restoration by Hungarian National Film Institute

    Thursday, July 14 7 PM

    Damnation, “a tale of erotic obsession,” is a brilliant calling card. “Its melancholy, hurdy-gurdy score, exaggerated sound design, ritual ensemble dances, inexorable camera moves suggest a dry run for Tarr’s. . . Satantango” (J. Hoberman). 

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  • Toute une nuit

    Chantal Akerman
    Belgium, France, 1982
    Sunday, July 17 5 PM

    “Playing as a series of richly textured tableaux . . . featuring full-bodied embraces, phone calls punctuated by the longing of distance, breakups, recouplings and impromptu dances. . . . Akerman achieves an aura of singular intimacy” (Patrick Preziosi).

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  • La ronde

    Max Ophuls
    France, 1950

    BAMPFA Collection

    Sunday, July 24 7 PM

    Love’s ceaseless roundabout, set in the Vienna of the waltz. “Ophuls displays dazzling technical virtuosity and cinematic elegance” (Chicago Reader).

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  • Free Outdoor Screening: The Gold Rush

    Charles Chaplin
    United States, 1925

    The reedited 1942 version of The Gold Rush will be shown for free on Sunday, June 12, in the Barbro Osher Theater.

    Thursday, August 4 7 PM

    A hapless prospector tries his luck in the frozen north in a film that glitters with some of Charlie Chaplin’s most memorable nuggets of comedy, including a pair of dancing rolls.

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  • Free Outdoor Screening: Band of Outsiders

    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1964
    Thursday, August 18 7 PM

    Anna Karina gets involved with a pair of would-be burglars in one of Godard’s most accessible and entrancing films, with exquisitely gritty black-and-white cinematography by Raoul Coutard and music by Michel Legrand. “Like a reverie of a gangster movie” (Pauline Kael).

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  • Free Outdoor Screening: Do the Right Thing

    Spike Lee
    United States, 1989
    Thursday, August 25 7 PM

    Lee’s frequently hilarious but hard-hitting drama charts mounting racial tensions on a hot summer day in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “The funniest, most stylized, most visceral New York street scene this side of Scorseseland” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).

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