Indelible Moments: May I Have This Dance

June 12–August 25, 2022

A selection of films in which a dance scene crystallizes the experience of the movie, a moment leaving its imprint more than the plotline or even the characters.

Read full description

  • Band of Outsiders

  • Killer of Sheep

  • Beau travail

  • My Darling Clementine

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

Past Films

  • Free Outdoor Screening: Do the Right Thing

    • Thursday, August 25 7 PM
    Spike Lee
    United States, 1989

    Lee’s frequently hilarious but hard-hitting drama charts mounting racial tensions on a hot summer day in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “The funniest, most stylized, most visceral New York street scene this side of Scorseseland” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).

  • Free Outdoor Screening: Band of Outsiders

    • Thursday, August 18 7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1964

    Anna Karina gets involved with a pair of would-be burglars in one of Godard’s most accessible and entrancing films, with exquisitely gritty black-and-white cinematography by Raoul Coutard and music by Michel Legrand. “Like a reverie of a gangster movie” (Pauline Kael).

  • Free Outdoor Screening: The Gold Rush

    • Thursday, August 4 7 PM
    Charles Chaplin
    United States, 1925

    The reedited 1942 version of The Gold Rush will be shown for free on Sunday, June 12, in the Barbro Osher Theater.

    A hapless prospector tries his luck in the frozen north in a film that glitters with some of Charlie Chaplin’s most memorable nuggets of comedy, including a pair of dancing rolls.

  • La ronde

    • Sunday, July 24 7 PM
    Max Ophuls
    France, 1950

    BAMPFA Collection

    Love’s ceaseless roundabout, set in the Vienna of the waltz. “Ophuls displays dazzling technical virtuosity and cinematic elegance” (Chicago Reader).

  • Toute une nuit

    • Sunday, July 17 5 PM
    Chantal Akerman
    Belgium, France, 1982

    “Playing as a series of richly textured tableaux . . . featuring full-bodied embraces, phone calls punctuated by the longing of distance, breakups, recouplings and impromptu dances. . . . Akerman achieves an aura of singular intimacy” (Patrick Preziosi).

  • Damnation

    • Thursday, July 14 7 PM
    Béla Tarr
    Hungary, 1988

    New 4K Restoration by Hungarian National Film Institute

    Damnation, “a tale of erotic obsession,” is a brilliant calling card. “Its melancholy, hurdy-gurdy score, exaggerated sound design, ritual ensemble dances, inexorable camera moves suggest a dry run for Tarr’s. . . Satantango” (J. Hoberman). 

  • Killer of Sheep

    • Thursday, July 7 7 PM
    Charles Burnett
    United States, 1977

    New 35mm BAMPFA Collection Print

    A poetic evocation of working-class Watts, “a great—the greatest—cinematic tone poem of American urban life” (New York), Killer of Sheep’s “single most-recalled moment” is “the slow-dance scene between the . . . alienated Stan and his wife” (Adrian Martin). 

    Introduced by Ruth Gebreyesus

  • Playtime

    • Sunday, July 3 5 PM
    Jacques Tati
    France, Italy, 1967

    Tati’s vision of 1960s Paris is “perhaps the most madly modernistic work of anti-modernism in the history of cinema” (New Yorker). And for Tati, “The more the picture continues, the more the people dance” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

  • White Nights

    • Sunday, June 26 5 PM
    Luchino Visconti
    Italy, France, 1957

    Imported 35mm Print

    Marcello Mastroianni stars in a romantic, sublimely artificial adaptation of the Dostoyevsky story about people drifting along crossing, doubling paths.

  • Beau travail

    • Thursday, June 23 7 PM
    Claire Denis
    France, 1999

    In this story of French Legionnaires isolated in a blisteringly beautiful African setting, Denis creates “a fixed, timeless world of mysterious, balletic rites, rippled with simmering homoerotic tensions. . . . Prepare to be blown away” (Time Out).

  • My Darling Clementine

    • Sunday, June 19 5 PM
    John Ford
    United States, 1946

    In this tender Western, a dance between Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Clementine (Cathy Downs) “is the turning point of the movie, and marks the end of the Old West” (Roger Ebert).

  • Vivre sa vie

    • Thursday, June 16 7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1962

    In twelve tableaux, Vivre sa vie tells of Nana (Anna Karina) at the brief, flickering moment when she takes responsibility for her life. The ninth episode includes “perhaps the saddest ‘happy’ dance scene in cinema” (Ifan Davies).

  • The Gold Rush

    • Sunday, June 12 2 PM
    Charles Chaplin
    United States, 1925, reedited 1942

    Free Family Day Screening—Free Admission!

    The original 1925 version of The Gold Rush will be shown for free on the outdoor screen Thursday, August 4.

    A hapless prospector tries his luck in the frozen north in a film that glitters with some of Chaplin’s most memorable nuggets of comedy, including our hero leading a pair of rolls in a graceful soft-shoe.

  • Casque d’or

    • Sunday, June 12 5:30 PM
    Jacques Becker
    France, 1952

    A dazzling Simone Signoret is caught between a gangster tough and an honest carpenter in Becker’s “elegant masterwork” (Time Out) set in turn-of-the century Paris. With Pass the Gravy, a silent comedy short with Max Davidson.

    Introduced by Edith Kramer