Alternative Visions

September 3–November 19, 2025

This year, Alternative Visions includes work from across one hundred years of cinema history—from Sergei Eisenstein’s breathtaking agitprop first feature Strike (1925) to Kahlil Joseph’s time-traveling cinematic encyclopedia BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025).

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  • Marie Menken: Go! Go! Go!, 1962–64

  • Tomonari Nishikawa: Tokyo—Ebisu, 2010

  • Kahlil Joseph: BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, 2025

  • Sergei Eisenstein: Strike, 1925

  • Ken Jacobs: Little Stabs at Happiness, 1963

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

Past Films

  • The Seashell and the Clergyman and The Blood of a Poet

    Wednesday, September 3 7 PM
    Introduction by Miriam Sas; Judith Rosenberg on Piano

    Leading figures of the French avant-garde in the 1920s, Germaine Dulac and Jean Cocteau used the potential of film editing, cinematography, and special effects to create poetic visions and dreamlike, logic-defying journeys and scenarios.

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  • Strike

    Sergei Eisenstein
    USSR, 1925

    BAMPFA Collection

    Wednesday, September 10 7 PM
    Introduction by Anne Nesbet; Judith Rosenberg on Piano

    A strike by a group of factory workers and its brutal suppression form the backbone of Sergei Eisenstein’s agitprop masterpiece of ferocious montage.

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  • Rituals in Transfigured Time: Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, and Kenneth Anger

    Wednesday, September 17 7 PM

    Cinematic choreography and bodies in motion are central to the films in this program—from Maya Deren’s iconic psychodramas to Sidney Peterson’s San Francisco–set surrealist The Lead Shoes and Kenneth Anger’s paean to glamour, Puce Moment.

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  • 16mm Notebooks and Diaries

    Wednesday, September 24 7 PM

    Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas were forerunners in the development of poetic 16mm cinema sketches and diaries documenting everyday life, and their work inspired many filmmakers, including Mako Idemitsu and Ute Aurand. 

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  • Everything Is Now: J. Hoberman in Person

    Wednesday, October 1 7 PM
    J. Hoberman in Person

    BAMPFA welcomes J. Hoberman to discuss his book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. He will also present a program of films that is representative of the cross-pollination of poetry, painting, film, music, and performance the book chronicles. A book signing will take place after the program.

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  • Crazy Love

    Michio Okabe
    Japan, 1968
    Wednesday, October 8 7 PM
    Introduction by Miryam Sas

    A queer pop collage epic, Crazy Love reflects the revolutionary zeitgeist of the late 1960s. “Challenging established social norms and codes of sexual behaviour, it is a testament both to a liberated, experimental moment in art and film, and to an iconoclastic filmmaker” (Queer East Festival). 

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  • Cheryl Dunye’s Short Work

    Wednesday, October 15 7 PM
    Cheryl Dunye and Allegra Madsen in Conversation

    Cheryl Dunye’s fantastic short films chart the evolution of her voice: ”DIY, Black, queer, and always a little bit disruptive. These shorts are where I found my vision and learned to bend form to tell truths that didn’t yet have a genre.”

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  • Mako Idemitsu Videos

    Wednesday, October 22 7 PM

    Recoding the conventions of soap opera melodrama, Mako Idemitsu creates domestic narratives that examine the cultural role and identity of women within the context of the late twentieth-century Japanese family.

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  • BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

    Kahlil Joseph
    United States, Ghana, 2025

    Free admission. Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 6 PM.

    Wednesday, October 29 7 PM
    Kahlil Joseph, Onye Anyanwu, and Abigail De Kosnik in Conversation

    Weaving fiction and history in an immersive journey in which the fictionalized figures of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey join artists, musicians, Kahlil Joseph’s family, and even Twitter chats, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a vision for Black consciousness.

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  • The Films of Tomonari Nishikawa

    Wednesday, November 5 7 PM

    Tomonari Nishikawa’s films are a thrilling cinematic dialogue between the places, spaces, and architecture he documented and the filmstock, cameras, and lenses he used to record. 

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  • Gunvor Nelson: Program 1

    Wednesday, November 12 7 PM
    Steve Anker, Lynne Sachs, and John Sundholm in Conversation

    Gunvor Nelson’s My Name Is Oona, a hypnotic portrait of the artist’s daughter and an essential classic of experimental cinema, screens with Schmeerguntz, a touchstone of feminist cinema, and Frame Line and Light Years, made in Sweden.

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  • Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

    Kazuo Hara
    Japan, 1974
    Wednesday, November 19 7 PM
    Introduction by Miryam Sas

    Kazuo Hara’s extraordinarily intimate portrait of Miyuki Takeda, his former partner and mother of his child, breaks down the boundaries between filmmaker and subject reflecting on their relationship(s) as Takeda searches to make a life on her own terms.

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