The Art of Cinematography

November 5–December 29, 2017

Revel in cinema as a visual art with this international lineup of celebrated classics and lesser-known discoveries.

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  • Manufactured Landscapes

  • Last Year at Marienbad

  • The Passion of Joan of Arc

  • Cléo from 5 to 7

  • Ran

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

Past Films

  • Last Year at Marienbad

    • Friday, December 29 7 PM
    Alain Resnais
    France, 1961

    35mm Print

    It’s déjà vu all over the place in Alain Resnais’s elegant, labyrinthine puzzle, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and starring Delphine Seyrig.

  • Le cercle rouge

    • Thursday, December 28 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1970

    35mm Print

    Alain Delon, Gian-Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand star as thief, convict, and lawman in Jean-Pierre Melville’s “dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters, and cigarettes” (Los Angeles Times).

  • Ran

    • Wednesday, December 27 6:30 PM
    Akira Kurosawa
    Japan, France, 1985

    35mm Print

    King Lear in feudal Japan, with Tatsuya Nakadai as the lord who divides his kingdom among his three sons, with disastrous results. “A majestic piece of filmmaking” (Village Voice).

  • Cléo from 5 to 7

    • Saturday, December 9 6 PM
    • Wednesday, December 27 4:30 PM
    Agnès Varda
    France, 1962

    Digital Restoration

    Shot entirely on location in the streets of Paris, Cléo chronicles two hours in the life of a pop singer. A classic work of the French New Wave, “almost unique in the history of movies” (Pauline Kael).

  • Throne of Blood

    • Saturday, December 23 6 PM
    Akira Kurosawa
    Japan, 1957

    35mm Print

    Kurosawa’s Noh-influenced version of Macbeth is “the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare on screen” (Time). The towering Toshiro Mifune stars.

  • La Pointe Courte

    • Sunday, December 17 2 PM
    Agnès Varda
    France, 1955

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    Made outside the French film industry on a shoestring budget, Agnès Varda’s 1954 debut about two reunited lovers in a Mediterranean fishing port has been called the first film of the French New Wave.

  • The Passion of Joan of Arc

    • Saturday, December 16 6:15 PM
    Carl Theodor Dreyer
    France, 1928

    35mm Archival Print

    Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film focuses on the face as a landscape of the soul. Pauline Kael called it “one of the greatest of all movies.”

    Judith Rosenberg on Piano

  • The Passion of Joan of Arc

    • Friday, November 24 3:30 PM
    • Sunday, December 10 2 PM
    Carl Theodor Dreyer
    France, 1928

    New Digital Restoration

    Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film focuses on the face as a landscape of the soul. Pauline Kael called it “one of the greatest of all movies.”

  • Pour la suite du monde

    • Sunday, December 10 4 PM
    Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault
    Canada, 1963

    Digital Restoration

    Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault beautifully evoke the rhythms of rural life and language in this enchanting documentary about traditional customs on an isolated island in Quebec.

  • Antonio Gaudí

    • Saturday, December 2 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, December 9 4 PM
    Hiroshi Teshigahara
    Japan, 1985

    35mm Print

    Hiroshi Teshigahara’s study of the visionary Catalan architect’s work, scored by the great Toru Takemitsu. “A masterpiece of visual poetry and aesthetic rumination” (Time Out New York).

  • The First Teacher

    • Friday, December 8 4 PM
    Andrei Konchalovsky
    USSR, 1966

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    Andrei Konchalovsky’s first feature, set in a Kirghiz village shortly after the Revolution. “The beauty of tradition and the need for change . . . expressed with a deft simplicity of style and a rare quality of emotion” (Michel Ciment).

  • I Am Cuba

    • Wednesday, December 6 7 PM
    Mikhail Kalatozov
    Cuba, USSR, 1964

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    This portrait of revolutionary Cuba, written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and brimming with bravura camerawork, is an extraordinary example of “pure” cinema in the service of politics.

  • Manufactured Landscapes

    • Sunday, November 26 3 PM
    Jennifer Baichwal
    Canada, 2006

    35mm Print

    This quietly provocative consideration of the mechanized sublime follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels through China and Bangladesh recording large-scale industrial incursions into the landscape.

  • The Seventh Seal

    • Sunday, November 26 5 PM
    Ingmar Bergman
    Sweden, 1957

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    A medieval knight challenges Death to a game of chess in Ingmar Bergman’s iconic work of cinematic philosophy rendered in chiaroscuro. “A magically powerful film” (Pauline Kael).

  • Citizen Kane

    • Saturday, November 25 5:30 PM
    Orson Welles
    United States, 1941

    35mm Print

    A childhood memory is the ultimate red herring in Welles’s audacious debut. Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is just one reason why Kane still tops many critics’ lists of the best films of all time.

  • The Tarnished Angels

    • Saturday, November 25 8 PM
    Douglas Sirk
    United States, 1957

    35mm Print

    Rock Hudson plays a New Orleans newspaperman who develops an unprofessional fascination with carnival fliers Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone in Douglas Sirk’s drama, based on a story by William Faulkner and shot in sweeping CinemaScope black-and-white.

  • My Grandmother

    • Sunday, November 12 2 PM
    Kote Mikaberidze
    Soviet Union, 1929

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    Gogol meets Chaplin in this riotous, scathingly antibureaucratic satire, one of the eccentric high points of Soviet silent cinema, filled with expressionist décor, askew camera angles, and even puppetry and animation.

  • Battleship Potemkin

    • Sunday, November 5 2 PM
    Sergei Eisenstein
    USSR, 1925

    BAMPFA Collection

    Sergei Eisenstein’s classic on revolution and rebellion, told almost entirely through riveting images, can be appreciated for “not only the perfection of its form, but the humanitarianism and enthusiasm that impregnated its revolutionary subject” (Georges Sadoul).