Film 50: History of Cinema, Film and the Other Arts

1/18/12 to 4/25/12

A UC Berkeley course open to the public as space permits, Film 50: History of Cinema takes as its theme this semester films that make prominent use of another art form: theater, literature, painting, dance, music, architecture, or photography. Each screening is presented with a lecture by Marilyn Fabe (Department of Film and Media). SERIES IS SOLD OUT. A limited number of rush tickets may available at the box office before each screening.

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

Past Films

  • Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

    • Wednesday, April 25 3:10 pm

    Guy Maddin (Canada, 2002). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Yes, you heard right, it's a ballet-but you've never seen a dance film like this before. Both deliriously silly and earnestly beautiful, steeped in the aesthetics of silent cinema, this Dracula is thoroughly, deliciously Maddin. (75 mins)

  • Adaptation

    • Wednesday, April 18 3:10 pm

    Spike Jonze (U.S., 2002). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the team behind Being John Malkovich, reunited for this meta-tale involving a repressed, shy screenwriter (“Charlie Kaufman”) stumped for ideas on adaptating the nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, until his swinging twin brother Donald comes along. Nicolas Cage stars, with Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. (114 mins)

  • Playtime

    • Wednesday, April 11 3:10 pm

    Jacques Tati (France, 1967). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Tati's vision of sixties Paris is “perhaps the most madly modernistic work of anti-modernism in the history of cinema”(New Yorker). (123 mins)

  • Red Desert

    • Wednesday, April 4 3:10 pm

    Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France, 1964) New 35mm Print! Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Antonioni's first color film draws images of alarming beauty from environmental apocalypse as an industrialist's wife (Monica Vitti) suffers a nervous breakdown. “Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity” (Time). (113 min)


  • To Kill a Mockingbird

    • Wednesday, March 21 3:10 pm

    Robert Mulligan (U.S., 1962). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of courageous lawyer Atticus Finch in this stirring adaptation of the Harper Lee novel. The struggle for civil rights in the American South is seen through the eyes of a child, as she watcher her father-a lawyer-defend a black man accused of rape in ‘30s Alabama. (125 mins)

  • Vertigo

    • Wednesday, March 14 3:10 pm

    Alfred Hitchcock (U.S., 1958). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Detective Jimmy Stewart combs the Bay Area looking for the secret behind Kim Novak's beauty in Hitchcock's sinister ode to voyeurism, death, and amorous fixation. “Perhaps the finest film starring San Francisco” (San Francisco Chronicle). (128 mins)

  • Throne of Blood

    • Wednesday, March 7 3:10 pm

    Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1957). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. 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 is paired with the legendary Isuzu Yamada in “a partnership of titans” (Film Forum). (107 mins)

  • Pather Panchali

    • Wednesday, February 29 3:10 pm

    Satyajit Ray (India, 1955). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Two classics of postwar cinema: Ray's monumental Pather Panchali, which follows a young boy in rural Bengal, and features a score by Ravi Shankar, and Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, a “surrealist nightmare film” by the matriarch of American experimental cinema. (129 mins)

  • The Red Shoes

    • Wednesday, February 22 3:10 pm

    Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger (U.K., 1948) 35mm Restored Print! Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. A ballerina must choose between love and art in this ravishing Technicolor melodrama, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's story and considered by many to be the best ballet film ever made.

  • Swing Time

    • Wednesday, February 15 3:10 pm

    Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers swing their way through Manhattan in this, one of the most effervescent of all Hollywood musicals. Music by Jerome Kern. (105 mins)

  • Rope

    • Wednesday, February 8 3:10 pm

    Alfred Hitchcock (U.S., 1948). Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Hitchcock's tale of two young men who attempt the perfect murder was infamously shot to resemble one long, continuous take. “Not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary” (New York Times). With Buster Keaton's The Playhouse (1921). (80 mins)

  • The Mystery of Picasso

    • Wednesday, February 1 3:10 pm

    Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1956). Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this colorful documentary glimpse of the seventy-five-year-old Picasso captures the fecund nature of his creative process, a spontaneous revelation of form in continual transformation. “One of the most exciting and joyful movies ever made” (Pauline Kael). (78 mins)

  • Back to the Beginning: From the Cinema of Attractions to Narrative Illusionism

    • Wednesday, January 25 3:10 pm

    Lecture by Marilyn Fabe. Judith Rosenberg on Piano.

  • Course Introduction: The Language of Cinema

    • Wednesday, January 18 3:10 pm

    Lecture by Marilyn Fabe