Admission $2.50
Professor William Nestrick is Head of Film Studies, and teaches in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at UC Berkeley. William Nestrick Selects will be presented each Monday at 5:30 through November.
“The films that comprise this month's series are the descendants of German Expressionism. They acknowledge their affiliation stylistically and variously--sometimes through chiaroscuro lighting (as in the stairway of Frankenstein's tower or in the white figure and white doves against the forest black, the image that concludes Eyes Without a Face), sometimes through the transformation of exterior realities to express interior ones (as in the hallucinatory sequence in The Spirit of the Beehive). Recent theoreticians (Jean-Louis Comolli, Christine Gledhill) have questioned the dominant aesthetics of realism, and the time seems ripe to relook at the alternative tradition. These films reduplicate in their narratives the issue of generation and regeneration, the monster in Frankenstein, and the daughters of the scientists in Eyes Without a Face and The Spirit of the Beehive, who must confront the ideological realities of their creators.” William Nestrick
