Reverse Angle: Cinema Looks at Itself

January 20–April 1, 2018

This rich array of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works interrogates film as a medium and asks what cinema’s social and cultural role is or could be.

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  • Notfilm

  • A Useful Life

  • Dawson City: Frozen Time

  • Sacred Places

  • The Thoughts That Once We Had

  • Two Marxists in Hollywood

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich

    Chris Marker
    France, 2000

    Film to Table dinner follows

    Saturday, January 20 6 PM

    Chris Marker’s cinematic psalm to Andrei Tarkovsky transports the viewer into Tarkovsky’s films and his world. With Marker’s short on the Russian director Alexander Medvedkin, The Train Rolls On.

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  • Dawson City: Frozen Time

    Bill Morrison
    United States, 2017
    Sunday, January 21 6:30 PM
    Bill Morrison in Person

    Bill Morrison presents his beautiful meditation on a rare trove of silent nitrate film, as well as the barren Canadian Yukon town where it was found. “Both awe-inspiring and humbling” (New York Times).

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  • A Useful Life

    Federico Veiroj
    Uruguay, 2010

    BAMPFA Collection

    Sunday, January 28 7 PM

    A lifelong film archivist faces a new beginning with the threatened closure of his institution in this loving black-and-white ode to a life lived among the reels. “An elegy to cinephilia” (Slant). With Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge and Alexi Manis’s Luminous.

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  • A Film Unfinished

    Yaël Hersonski
    Israel, 2010

    BAMPFA Collection

    Sunday, February 4 7 PM
    Introduction by William Guynn

    A remarkable examination of what happens when a film on the Warsaw Ghetto, discovered shortly after World War II and thought to be documentary footage, turns out to be an unfinished propaganda film.

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  • Notfilm

    Ross Lipman
    United States, 2015
    Friday, February 16 7 PM

    Lipman’s fascinating kino-essay examines a 1965 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. “Testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema” (New York Times). With the original article: Samuel Beckett’s Film.

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  • Cinema: A Public Affair

    Tatiana Brandrup
    Germany, 2015
    Thursday, February 22 7 PM

    This profile of Naum Kleiman, an acclaimed film historian and former director of Moscow’s Cinema Museum and Eisenstein Center, celebrates “a modest, inspiring cultural figure [with a] conviction that cinema can be used to construct a free civil society” (Hollywood Reporter).

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  • Sacred Places

    Jean-Marie Téno
    Cameroon, France, 2009
    Sunday, March 4 7 PM
    Christian Bruno, Natalija Vekic, and Emily Chao in Person

    A bootleg DVD, an old TV, and beat-up benches are all you need to keep cinema alive—at least in one run-down Burkinabe neighborhood—in Téno’s tribute to African hustle and cinephilia. With Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic’s Ed and Pauline and Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town.

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  • The Thoughts That Once We Had

    Thom Andersen
    United States, 2015
    Sunday, March 18 7 PM

    The film essayist behind Red Hollywood and Los Angeles Plays Itself returns with this personal history of cinema, inspired by Gilles Deleuze. “Less a lecture than a wordless, associative, haunted journey not just through the history of cinematic innovation, but through the 20th century itself” (The Guardian).

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  • Salaam Cinema

    Mohsen Makhmalbaf
    Iran, 1995
    Saturday, March 31 7:30 PM

    Acclaimed Iranian director Makhmalbaf blurs the line between fiction and reality by turning a casting call into cinema, and his prospective actors into subjects, in this tribute to (and wry jab at) the power of film. “Witty and slyly relevant” (Variety).

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  • A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood

    Sunday, April 1 7 PM
    Zoe Beloff in Person

    Experimental filmmaker Zoe Beloff revisits the Hollywood exile of two revolutionaries—Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht—in an illustrated presentation and a trilogy of short films.

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