BAMPFA Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who organized What Has Been and What Could Be, offers a curatorial walkthrough of her new collection-based exhibition, addressing selected works from each thematic section, as well as sharing perspectives on curating from the museum’s collection.

Film and performance works, part of the 53rd Annual Berkeley MFA Exhibition

In Larissa Shepitko’s masterpiece, the partisan struggle against the Nazis in World War II provides the setting for a tale of morality and martyrdom. “A profoundly moving experience” (Filmex ’78) that was awarded the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and hailed as the finest Soviet film of its decade. Tom Luddy hosted Shepitko at the Pacific Film Archive in September 1977, not long before her tragic death in a car accident.

A compelling Claudia Cardinale anchors Luchino Visconti’s effortless integration of family history into a panoramic account of the Risorgimento. “Perhaps no film captures the Proustian aesthetic more firmly” (Warren Sonbert).

Tours of Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory are led by UC Berkeley graduate students in history of art, Chicanx/Latinx studies, and theater, dance, and performance studies.

Errol Morris’s brilliant debut feature, Gates of Heaven, about two pet cemeteries in Northern California and the people involved with them, is a work closely tied to the era when Tom Luddy directed the Pacific Film Archive and Morris was a regular member of the audience. The completion of this film led to the making of Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (screening June 17 at 4:30 PM).

A police detective encounters a cross section of Italian society as he investigates two crimes in the same Rome apartment building in Pietro Germi’s combination of neorealism, film noir, and even comedy.

Toshiro Mifune is a driven detective in Akira Kurosawa’s bravura Tokyo noir. “A bona fide masterpiece” (Time Out).

“As in all of [Les] Blank’s films, the people interviewed [in Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers] are beautiful, natural, and full of zest for life. These garlic-lovers take great pride in their own identity, glorifying it in song and dance and turning it into constant celebration” (Rob Baker, Soho Weekly News). With Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and two remembrances to Blank by Tom Luddy, Alice Waters, and Werner Herzog.

A southern Italian family seeking a better life in Milan mirrors the transformation of postwar Italian society in Luchino Visconti’s masterwork starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in an early role. “The emotional sweep of a Verdi opera and the narrative density of a nineteenth-century novel” (New York Times).