Cinema According to Víctor Erice
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Past Events

  • It's a Wrap!

    Celebrate our final weekend at the PFA Theater with special screenings, live music, family fun, and gifts for members.

    Pacific Film Archive Theater

Past Films

  • Sansho the Bailiff

    Kenji Mizoguchi
    Japan, 1954

    BAM/PFA Collection Print!

    Thursday, June 25 7:30 PM

    Bring all your senses and your handkerchief to this haunting tale of a family (led by Kinuyo Tanaka) victimized by the cruel practices of feudal Japan, “developed with intuition, cunning, and an overarching sense of tragedy” (SF Weekly)

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  • Au hasard Balthazar

    Robert Bresson
    France, 1966
    Saturday, June 27 8:20 PM

    Bresson found the perfect protagonist for this film in a donkey, "born, like all beings, to suffer and die needlessly and mysteriously. . . . A morbidly beautiful flower of cinematic art" (Andrew Sarris).

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  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

    John Ford
    United States, 1962
    Sunday, June 28 7:30 PM

    James Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles, and Lee Marvin star in John Ford’s legendary Western, “one of the enduring masterpieces of that cinema which has chosen to focus on the mystical processes of time” (Andrew Sarris).

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  • Nazarín

    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1958

    Archival Print!

    Friday, July 10 7:00 PM

    Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography lends stark beauty to an unforgiving landscape in this Buñuel classic about a priest whose charity is his undoing.

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  • Earth

    Sunday, July 12 6:15 PM

    BAM/PFA Collection Print! Judith Rosenberg on piano. Dovzhenko's great film poem to the Ukraine he loved. "Dovzhenko seldom recaptured the pantheistic phosphorescence of this hymn both to nature and to the glittering new tractors and ploughs destined to transform it” (NFT, London)

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  • The River

    IB Technicolor Print!

    Wednesday, July 15 7:30 PM

    Based on a novel by the author of Black Narcissus, Renoir’s wise, warm Technicolor masterpiece follows several young girls coming of age on the River Ganges. “The artist, medium, and location combine, as though effortlessly, to produce an experience of surpassing loveliness” (NY Times)

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  • They Live By Night

    Nicholas Ray
    United States, 1949
    Friday, July 17 8:45 PM

    Ray's lyrical, passionate debut following a pair of fugitive innocents influenced films from Pierrot le Fou to Bonnie and Clyde.

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  • Zero for Conduct

    Jean Vigo
    France, 1945

    Free screening! 

    Friday, July 31 9:30 PM

    Enfant terrible Jean Vigo's lyric, anarchic account of rebellion in a boarding school is poetry, wild in hatred and tender in remembrance.

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  • City Lights

    Charlie Chaplin
    United States, 1931

    Part of It’s a Wrap! celebrating our final weekend in the PFA Theater

     

    Saturday, August 1 4:00 PM

    “Chaplin’s most masterful blend of pathos and comedy . . . You can’t leave the planet without seeing this movie at least once” (SF Chronicle).

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  • Bicycle Thief

    Vittorio De Sica
    Italy, 1949

    Part of It’s a Wrap! celebrating our final weekend in the PFA Theater

     

    Saturday, August 1 8:45 PM

    De Sica’s masterpiece of a father and son searching the streets of Rome for their stolen bicycle is considered one of the greatest films ever made. “An allegory at once timeless and topical” (Village Voice).

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  • The Kid

    Charlie Chaplin
    United States, 1921

    Part of It’s a Wrap! celebrating our final weekend in the PFA Theater.
    Followed by a demonstration-workshop in the art of pantomime with Charlie Chaplin impersonator Damian Blake. Bring the whole family to learn how to walk like Chaplin!

     

     

    Sunday, August 2 3:30 PM

    The film that established Chaplin's signature fusion of slapstick and pathos, and the first to costar Jackie Coogan. 

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  • Tokyo Story

    Yasujiro Ozu
    Japan, 1953

    Part of It’s a Wrap! celebrating our final weekend in the PFA Theater

     

    Sunday, August 2 8:15 PM

    This simple, sad story of the gap between generations in a Japanese family revealed to Western viewers the poetic acuteness of Ozu's style, and features one of Japanese cinema’s greatest performances in Setsuko Hara’s role as a becalmed, utterly determined young woman. "Wonderful . . . one of the manifest miracles of cinema" (New Yorker). 

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