Time's Shadow

July 1, 6, 13, 15, 22, 27, 29, August 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 at Pacific Film Archive

In conjunction with the BAM gallery exhibition of early photographs, "Time's Shadow," on view through August 8,Pacific Film Archive will screen eleven feature films and fifteen short films that treat, as does the photography exhibition, themes of ruins.

Screenings will be held in the PFA Theater, located at 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street in Berkeley. General admission is $8 for one film, and $10 for double bills. There are reduced prices for members, students, seniors, children under 12, and persons with disabilities. For complete program and ticket information, please visit www.bampfa.berkeley.edu, or telephone (510) 642-1412.

"Time's Shadow: Film Among the Ruins" offer short films, dramatic features, and avant garde works, ranging from F. W. Murnau's vampire classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror to Lithuanian director Sarunas Bartas's Corridor. We offer Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, which stars George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman in a touching tale of a failing marriage and Fellini Satyricon, an ebullient vision of ancient Rome which the director called "a science fiction picture, but projected into the past, not the future." Andrei Tarkovski's Nostalghia depicts a ramble through beautiful Italian ruins. The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) is a taut psychological thriller filmed in the rubble of postwar Germany. And Life Goes On, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is a moving drama set in Iran after an earthquake.

Short films include works by influential anime artist Osamu Tezuka, Chris Marker's 1981 film of the Emeryville Mud Flats debris sculptures, the Quay Brothers' adaptation of a Bruno Schultz story, Street of Crocodiles, and Julie Murray's 2002 memorial to the World Trade Center towers, Untitled (Light).

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci's From the Pole to the Equator is an intriguing compilation of early travel films, with damaged footage providing visual texture to its saga of cultural imperialism, a theme also treated in Jesse Lerner's Ruins, a multi-layered study of art forgery and the de-contextualizing of Mayan and Aztec objects. Decasia, a 2002 film by Bill Morrison, is a lovely collage of snippets of decomposing archival film footage, and Lyrical Nitrate compiles beautiful fragments of tinted nitrate films made from 1905 to 1915.

Posted by admin on July 01, 2004