Time's Shadow

7/1/04 to 8/31/04

And Life Goes On|July 15|

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Past Films

Decasia
- Tuesday, August 31 7:30pm
Bill Morrison's film created from decomposing early footage has garnered wide praise. "Who knew that decay itself-artfully marshaled, braided, scored and sustained-could provoke such transports of sublime reverie amid such pangs of wistful sorrow?"-Lawrence Weschler, NY Times Magazine
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
- Tuesday, August 24 7:30pm
Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Made in 1922, Nosferatu is still the most unnerving and poetic of horror films, for the way director F. W. Murnau invests the natural world with eerie incandescence, and for Max Schreck's vampire, a living death, a walking ruin.
Ruins
- Tuesday, August 17 7:30pm
When is a ruin not a ruin? When it's a work of art. The forger's craft may be more real than we know in Jesse Lerner's provocative look at colonialism, appropriation, and Mexican culture. With shorts by Lerner and Peggy Ahwesh.
Existing on Its Ruins
- Tuesday, August 10 7:30pm
Ruination is the backdrop to this group of moving works. Settings include a Palestinian refugee camp, the World Trade Center site, a destroyed Colombian village. Works by Louise Bourque, Abigail Child, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Tirtza Even and Bosmat Alon, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Julie Murray.
From the Pole to the Equator: Free Screening!
- Thursday, August 5 5:30pm
Free tickets available at the PFA Theater starting at 4:30. A remarkable collection of early footage from travels around the world, deftly re-edited by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi to reveal social and metaphorical meanings.
Corridor
- Tuesday, August 3 7:30pm
The inhabitants of an apartment building drift through a Lithuanian winter in this meditative feature shot in noirish tones. Fragments of memories, shards of experience in what director Sarunas Bartas calls "a stocktaking of the post-Soviet reality."
Fellini Satyricon
- Thursday, July 29 7:30pm
The great Italian director's most lavish and visually inventive film uses the self-consuming debauchery of the Roman elite in the time of Nero to create an allegorical satire on late-20th-century society-a ruin in the making. A must-see on the big screen.
The Way Things Go
- Tuesday, July 27 7:30pm
The dog-eared, the damaged, and the decayed: the filmmaker as salvage artist, or how one thing leads to another. Works by the artist team Fischli-Weiss, Janie Geiser, Chris Marker, the Quay Brothers, and Osamu Tezuka.
Nostalghia
- Thursday, July 22 7:30pm
Andrei Tarkovsky's breathtaking journey through the ruined but magical spaces of Tuscany follows a Russian man who feels the longing for home, closure, and the absolute that the film's title describes.
And Life Goes On
- Thursday, July 15 7:30pm
In an Iranian village following the 1990 earthquake, Abbas Kiarostami created this "transcendent work of art that explores the difference between real life and its cinematic representation and celebrates the indestructibility of the human spirit."-Film Center, Chicago
The Murderers Are Among Us
- Tuesday, July 13 7:30
The first and most famous of the postwar German "rubble films" is a stark and imaginatively visualized story of guilt and revenge, shot in a ruined Berlin just months after the war's end. Hildegard Knef stars, in her screen debut.
Lyrical Nitrate
- Tuesday, July 6 7:30pm
Peter Delpeut's exquisite montage of hand-tinted films from before 1915 makes us aware of early cinema's rich colors, and of its mortality, "as image literally reverts to matter."-Village Voice. With Phil Solomon's Exquisite Hour and a rare relic from 1914.
Voyage in Italy
- Thursday, July 1 7:30pm
Roberto Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman in this deeply moving film shot in Naples, with its "feeling of eternal life, something that has entirely disappeared from this world."-Rossellini

Time's Shadow

7/1/04 to 8/31/04

Ruins have long been an inspiration to artists, just as they are a source of speculation and research for archeologists. Variously seen as melancholic or picturesque, they are both site and metaphor, arousing meditations on human frailty, the fleeting quality of time, and the rise and fall of empires. In our series Time's Shadow: Film Among the Ruins, we present films that draw on ancient ruins and landmarks of antiquity from Rome to Mexico, and films set amid modern ruins, the devastating results of war, violence, and disaster, whether the rubble of postwar Germany, post-earthquake Iran, or the World Trade Center. And we present films concerned with the ephemeral nature of film itself. Some of the earliest writings on cinema suggest that it will forestall death by recording people and places for all time. We've come to learn that film, too, is impermanent, subject not only to accidents but to the deterioration of the...

This series is inspired by the exhibition Time's Shadow: Photographs from the Jan Leonard and Jerrold Piel Collection, on view in the BAM Theater Gallery through August 8.

Kathy Geritz

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We would like to acknowledge the series Ruínas presented at Cinemateca Portuguesa in 2001, and the program Among the Ruins presented by the Programming Commission at the 1996 FIAF Congress in Jerusalem. With thanks also to Jesse Lerner, James Quandt, and Paolo Cherchi Usai for their suggestions.