Joel Coen in Person

January 21–29, 2023

This carte blanche series provides the very special opportunity to see eight films selected by Joel Coen, four films of his own making and four films he admires.

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Inside Llewyn Davis
The Tragedy of Macbeth
A Serious Man
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Miller’s Crossing
The Dead

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Past Films

A Man Escaped
- Sunday, January 29 4 PM
Robert Bresson
France, 1956
From the true account of a Resistance leader who escaped from a Nazi prison just before he was to be executed, Bresson created a film where the drama is all internal. “Essential viewing” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Introduced by Joel Coen
A Serious Man
- Sunday, January 29 7 PM
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
United States, 2009
Via the existential, moral, and romantic crises of physics professor and family man Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), A Serious Man ponders the limits of human agency, reason, faith, and the meaning of life in the face of an impassive, chaotic universe.

Joel Coen and Eric Karpeles in Conversation
Le trou
- Saturday, January 28 3:30 PM
Jacques Becker
France, 1960
A group of convicts attempts an escape in Becker’s last film, one of the great prison-break movies and, for Jean-Pierre Melville, “the greatest French film of all time.”

Introduced by Joel Coen
Miller’s Crossing
- Saturday, January 28 7 PM
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
United States, 1990
Director’s Cut

Replete with crackling dialogue in fluent gangster-ese, elegant production design, and affecting performances, Miller’s Crossing—a Prohibition-era period piece conjured from Dashiell Hammett’s influential novels The Glass Key and Red Harvest—is classic Coen and quintessential Hammett. “An intoxicating achievement in cinematic chemistry” (Christopher Orr, Atlantic).

Joel Coen and Mark Danner in Conversation
The Dead
- Sunday, January 22 4 PM
John Huston
United States, 1987
Adapted from the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, John Huston’s The Dead considers the passage of time, morality, and shared and divergent relationships amongst the guests at an Epiphany party on a snowy Dublin evening.

Introduced by Joel Coen
Inside Llewyn Davis
- Sunday, January 22 7 PM
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
United States, 2013
In New York City in 1961, on the cusp of the efflorescence of the American folk scene, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) navigates the chilly metropolis in search of a gig, a handout, and/or place to sleep, accompanied on his picaresque journey by an aptly named cat.

Joel Coen and Timothy Hampton in Conversation
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
- Saturday, January 21 3 PM
F. W. Murnau
United States, 1927
Restored 35mm Print

Murnau handpicked Janet Gaynor to star in his first Hollywood feature. A masterpiece of silent cinema widely considered among the greatest films ever made, Sunrise tells an elemental tale with virtuosic visual invention.

Introduced by Joel Coen; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
The Tragedy of Macbeth
- Saturday, January 21 7 PM
Joel Coen
United States, 2021
Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s cursed tragedy is attentive to the power of its language while being profoundly cinematic, rendering a fog-shrouded, haunted place where fate and ambition collide.

Joel Coen, Frances McDormand, and Eileen Jones in Conversation

Joel Coen in Person

January 21–29, 2023

Since 1980 Joel and Ethan Coen have written and directed some twenty movies, most of which they also edited. Their command of film form was apparent from their first feature, and they have been beloved, quoted, and debated by generations of cinephiles ever since. Their remarkable oeuvre comprises a panoply of depictions of the human condition, as reflected through American popular and folk cultures and regional idioms. Lovingly rendered in exquisite detail, their films are a distillation of cinematic, musical, and cultural references, in the context of which their characters grapple with existential questions in the midst of adverse conditions—often of their own making. This carte blanche series provides the very special opportunity to see eight films selected by Joel Coen, four films of his own making and four films he admires. The series launches with F. W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans from 1927 and Joel Coen’s innovative adaptation of William Shakespeare’s cursed play. The Tragedy of Macbeth features Denzel Washington’s fierce portrayal of the ill-fated lord alongside Frances McDormand’s haunting interpretation of Lady Macbeth, a role honed at Berkeley Rep in 2016. The foregrounding of language and music and the elegiac tone of John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead and its alienated central character invite comparisons to the Coens’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, also playing in this series. A duo of classic French films—Jacques Becker’s Le trou and Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped—round out the carte blanche selections and screen adjacent to the Hammett-esque Miller’s Crossing and the most philosophical of the Coens’ films, A Serious Man.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

Special Admission for The Tragedy of Macbeth, Inside Llewyn Davis, Miller’s Crossing, and A Serious Man
General: $15
BAMPFA members: $11
UC Berkeley students: $7
UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12
BAMPFA’s second-feature discount does not apply to these programs.

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Film Series Sponsor: Susan Consey

Thanks to Gary Meyer; Eric Di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures; Universal Pictures; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Cameron Porette, A24; Edda Manriquez, Taylor Morales, Academy Film Archive; Alyssa Peeples, Swank Motion Pictures; Katie Dintelman, Criterion Pictures; Paul Rayton; Walter Murch; Catherine Farrell.