January 2020

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11 AM–7 PM
  • Activity
  • Art
Sunday, December 29, 2019
11 AM–7 PM

Drop-in Art Making

Sunday, December 29, 2019
2:30 PM
Shirley Sun,
United States,
2017,
(64 mins)

East Bay Premiere!

The Friday, December 13 screening features director Shirley Sun in person. The Sunday, December 29 screening will be presented without guests in person.

Bay Area filmmaker Shirley Sun’s engaging dance film goes behind the scenes with composer Shinji Eshima and San Francisco Ballet choreographer Yuri Possokhov as they recount their collaboration on the ballet RAkU, set in historic Japan.
  • Shirley Sun
    In Person, December 13
4:30 PM
  • Film
Sunday, December 29, 2019
4:30 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1985,
(105 mins)

Digital Restoration

The short life and eventual death of a young female drifter forms the basis of Varda’s chilling look at alienation and idealism. “Like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person” (Roger Ebert).
Sunday, December 29, 2019
7 PM
Louis Malle,
France,
1958,
(88 mins)

Digital Restoration

A restored print of Louis Malle’s first feature, an elegant thriller featuring an iconic performance by Jeanne Moreau and a celebrated Miles Davis jazz score. This “consistently engaging, atmospheric noir . . . remains worth treasuring” (Time Out New York).
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Wednesday, January 1, 2020
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1:15 PM
Thursday, January 2, 2020
1:15 PM
Explore the spirit of Surrealism with a guided tour of Strange. 
Included with admission
4 PM–7 PM
Thursday, January 2, 2020
4 PM–7 PM
Get on the grid with this array of works that organize images and ideas into a geometric structure.
Free admission
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12:15 PM
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
12:15 PM
Explore the spirit of Surrealism with a guided tour of Strange. 
Included with admission
7 PM
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
7 PM
Yasujiro Ozu,
Japan,
1957,
(141 mins)

Bay Area Premiere of Digital Restoration

Setsuko Hara stars as a woman trying to hold her family together in Ozu’s darkest, most urban film, set in the shadowy back streets of Ginza. “Retains an enormous dramatic power, perhaps because of [its] very divergences from the Ozu oeuvre” (Michael Koresky).
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7 PM
Thursday, January 9, 2020
7 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1955,
(80 mins)

BAMPFA Collection

Made outside the French film industry on a shoestring budget, Varda’s debut film about two reunited lovers in a Mediterranean fishing port has been called “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”
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6:30 PM
Friday, January 10, 2020
6:30 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1986,
(120 mins)

Digital Restoration

Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 
7 PM
  • In-Person
  • Performance
Friday, January 10, 2020
7 PM

Programmed by PC Muñoz

Recording artist PC Muñoz and a knockout array of Bay Area wordsmiths and musicians present an evening of literary and musical explorations inspired by the Beat Generation.
Included with admission. Seating for Full is limited.
Series Full 2020
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11:30 AM
  • Activity
  • Art
  • Families
  • Free
Saturday, January 11, 2020
11:30 AM

For ages 6 to 12 with accompanying adult(s)

Experience the magical realism of Sylvia Fein’s paintings, then learn a paint-resist technique for revealing mysterious eyes in unexpected places!
Free for kids 18 & under and for one adult per child 13 & under
  • Mary Curtis Ratcliff
    With artist
    After studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and cofounding the video collective Videofreex in New York, Mary Curtis Ratcliff moved to the Bay Area, where she makes sculpture, mixed m
Series Family Events
1 PM
  • Activity
  • Art
  • Families
  • Free
Saturday, January 11, 2020
1 PM

For ages 6 to 12 with accompanying adult(s)

Experience the magical realism of Sylvia Fein’s paintings, then learn a paint-resist technique for revealing mysterious eyes in unexpected places!
Free for kids 18 & under and for one adult per child 13 & under
  • Mary Curtis Ratcliff
    With artist
    After studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and cofounding the video collective Videofreex in New York, Mary Curtis Ratcliff moved to the Bay Area, where she makes sculpture, mixed m
Series Family Events
Saturday, January 11, 2020
1:30 PM
Fritz Lang,
France, Germany, Italy,
1959,
(101 mins)

Digital Restoration

Fritz Lang’s late-career epic is a fantasia of flamboyant set pieces. In Part I, a German architect in India encounters a man-eating tiger and falls for an exotic temple dancer, but has competition from the local maharajah.
Saturday, January 11, 2020
3 PM

Recommended for ages 8 & up (younger kids welcome as listeners)

Join us to read Raina Telgemeier’s relatable graphic novel about tummy trouble and how it relates to life’s ups and downs.
Free for kids 18 & under and for one adult per child 13 & under
  • Jennifer Gordon
    Reading led by
    Jennifer Gordon is a librarian at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley.
Series Family Events
Saturday, January 11, 2020
3:45 PM
Fritz Lang,
France, Germany, Italy,
1959,
(102 mins)

Digital Restoration

In the second part of Lang’s Indian epic, the romance between the German hero and his Indian beloved is imperiled, while a palace rebellion brews. The film reaches a pinnacle of exoticism with Debra Paget’s eye-popping “snake dance.”
6 PM
Saturday, January 11, 2020
6 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1962,
(90 mins)

Digital Restoration
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Shot entirely on location in the streets of Paris, Cléo chronicles two hours of a pop singer’s life. A score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Legrand, Jean-Luc Godard, and Anna Karina flavor this New Wave classic that proves Varda’s theme, “one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one.”
8 PM
  • Film
Saturday, January 11, 2020
8 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1976,
(90 mins)
Lynch’s debut feature, still creepy after all these years: “a masterpiece of texture . . . an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze” (Village Voice).
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4:30 PM
Sunday, January 12, 2020
4:30 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1980,
(123 mins)

Archival Print

Lynch turns the Victorian-era true story of “the ugliest man alive” into a study of prejudice, voyeurism, and human dignity, aided by a remarkable performance from John Hurt.
5 PM
Sunday, January 12, 2020
5 PM
In conjunction with the exhibition Strange, Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents this rarely performed theatrical work by French playwright Guillaume Apollinaire.
Included with admssion
Series Performances
7 PM
  • Film
Sunday, January 12, 2020
7 PM
Lucian Pintilie,
Romania,
1992,
(105 mins)

New 4K Restoration

A strong-willed Bucharest schoolteacher finds herself adrift and assaulted in Pintilie’s blisteringly apocalyptic farce of the last days of Ceauşescu’s rule, fueled by an “imaginative hysteria that rattles with sustained fury” (J. Hoberman).
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Tuesday, January 14, 2020
6:00 PM

Open to Curator’s Circle members at the $1,000 level and above 

Join artist Ron Nagle and Apsara DiQuinzio for a reception and preview to celebrate the opening of Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter.
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Wednesday, January 15, 2020
12 PM
Join exhibition curator Apsara DiQuinzio for an engaging, expert tour of Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter.
Included with admission
7 PM
  • Film
  • In-Person
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
7 PM
Charles Laughton,
United States,
1955,
(93 mins)

Restored 35mm Print

Robert Mitchum plays a predatory preacher who chases two innocent children across a menacing rural landscape in this eccentric, expressionistic Southern Gothic masterpiece. Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish costar.
  • Ron Nagle
    Introduction
    In conjunction with his retrospective at BAMPFA, artist Ron Nagle introduces a film he cites as an inspiration.
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7 PM
Thursday, January 16, 2020
7 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1952,
(86 mins)

Digital Restoration

The White Sheik also screens Wednesday, February 12, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

Provincial newlyweds arriving in Rome get sidetracked by the wife’s obsession with a fumetto photo-comic star in Fellini’s solo directorial debut. “A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people’s illusions” (Chicago Reader). 
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7 PM
Friday, January 17, 2020
7 PM
Agnès Varda, JR,
France,
2017,
(89 mins)

BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Varda teams up with hipster artist JR on a road trip across rural France, meeting the locals and creating large-scale portraits. One of Varda’s last films, and a first-rate achievement in her brilliant career.
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2:30 PM
Saturday, January 18, 2020
2:30 PM
Claude Barras,
France, Switzerland,
2017,
(66 mins)

Recommended for ages 12 & up

Will Forte, Nick Offerman, Ellen Page, and Amy Sedaris lend their voices to this stylized and sympathetic stop-motion animation about an orphan boy called Zucchini. Nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. 
4 PM
  • Film
Saturday, January 18, 2020
4 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1965,
(85 mins)
Varda’s strikingly colorful, lyrical film examines a love triangle within a circular structure, as a carpenter seeks happiness with both his wife and his mistress. “Varda fills her frames with riots of nature and color” (Richard Brody).
5 PM
Saturday, January 18, 2020
5 PM
Snowblink’s Daniela Gesundheit presents her new musical project exploring ceremonial Jewish prayer songs and blessings.
Included with admission
Series Performances
Saturday, January 18, 2020
7 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1960,
(174 mins)

The May 16 screening has been canceled. Learn more

BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Film to Table dinner follows the January 26 screening

Marcello Mastroianni stars as a jaded reporter drawn to the decadence of Rome in Fellini’s masterpiece, filled with jaw-dropping set pieces of both excess and warmth. “Fellini’s bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting” (Time Out). 
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Sunday, January 19, 2020
1:30 PM
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders,
United States,
2019,
(119 mins)

BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Pulitzer- and Nobel Peace Prize–winning author Toni Morrison recalls her life, challenges, and successes in this “eloquent nonfiction biopic” (Variety), featuring archival footage and interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Hilton Als, and others.
2 PM
Sunday, January 19, 2020
2 PM
Explore the spirit of Surrealism with a guided tour of Strange. 
Included with admission
4:30 PM
Sunday, January 19, 2020
4:30 PM
Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada,
Italy,
1950,
(97 mins)

Variety Lights also screens Wednesday, February 5, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

Following a troupe of small-time vaudevillians led by an incorrigible dreamer (Peppino De Filippo) and his fiancée (Giulietta Masina), this was Fellini’s first look at the passions and dreams of eccentrics living beyond bourgeois society—but not his last. 
Sunday, January 19, 2020
7 PM
Stere Gulea,
Romania,
1995,
(89 mins)
A hospital nurse speaks out against the corruption of the secret police—and pays the price—in this uncompromising examination of immorality, revolution, and social conviction. “One of the most powerful accounts of the Romanian Revolution” (Film Society of Lincoln Center).
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Wednesday, January 22, 2020
3:10 PM
(80 mins)

This program also screens Saturday, February 8 (without lecture).

These short films made in the sixties are both political and playful, in keeping with the times. Salut les cubains screens along with two works made in the Bay Area, Uncle Yanco (on Varda’s artist uncle) and Black Panthers (featuring Huey Newton and Kathleen Cleaver).
Special admission: 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.
  • Tom Luddy
    Lecture
    A former director and curator of the Pacific Film Archive and cofounder and codirector of the Telluride Film Festival, Tom Luddy was a friend and collaborator of Agnès Varda.
7 PM
  • Film
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
7 PM
Alfred Hitchcock,
United States,
1946,
(101 mins)

4K Digital Restoration

Trying to infiltrate a group of Nazis in Latin America, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman find themselves entangled in a cruel love affair. Hitchcock’s polished, perverse thriller exploits an espionage plot to explore the nature of love and loyalty. 
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Thursday, January 23, 2020
12 PM
The cofounder of Monument Lab talks about the organization’s approach to public engagement and collective memory, and the possibilities of public art.
Free admission
7 PM
  • Film
Thursday, January 23, 2020
7 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1973,
(127 mins)

All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been canceled through March 29. Learn more

Digital Restoration

Amarcord also screens Wednesday, April 1, with a lecture by David Thomson.

Fellini’s free-spirited portrait of Rimini in the 1930s, when fascism was a fact of life. “As full of tales as Scheherazade, some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiacal, some bawdy, some mysterious . . . a film of exhilarating beauty” (New York Times).
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4 PM
Friday, January 24, 2020
4 PM
Agnès Varda, Didier Rouget,
France,
2019,
(115 mins)

East Bay Advance Screenings

In the last of her prodigious life’s work, the legendary, delightfully irreverent Agnès Varda conducts a personal career retrospective as only she can, with skill, charm, wit, reverie, and wonder. “A master class on filmmaking” (Toronto Star).
7 PM
  • Film
Friday, January 24, 2020
7 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1984,
(137 mins)
Hired to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel about interplanetary palace intrigues, Lynch came up with this legendarily baffling, dreamlike missive from the subconscious, featuring Kyle MacLachlan and a leather-clad Sting.
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Saturday, January 25, 2020
1 PM
Fritz Lang,
France, Germany, Italy,
1959,
(101 mins)

Digital Restoration

Fritz Lang’s late-career epic is a fantasia of flamboyant set pieces. In Part I, a German architect in India encounters a man-eating tiger and falls for an exotic temple dancer, but has competition from the local maharajah.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
3:15 PM
Fritz Lang,
France, Germany, Italy,
1959,
(102 mins)

Digital Restoration

In the second part of Lang’s Indian epic, the romance between the German hero and his Indian beloved is imperiled, while a palace rebellion brews. The film reaches a pinnacle of exoticism with Debra Paget’s eye-popping “snake dance.”
5:30 PM
Saturday, January 25, 2020
5:30 PM
Radu Muntean,
Romania,
2006,
(95 mins)
A clueless tank crew wanders Bucharest’s chaotic streets on the night that Ceauşescu falls in Radu Muntean’s wry, humanist portrait of historic times.
7:30 PM
Saturday, January 25, 2020
7:30 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1953,
(105 mins)

I vitelloni also screens Wednesday, February 19, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

Fellini paired with the great Italian comic everyman Alberto Sordi for this look at the not-so-young sons of the middle class, (barely) growing up in the provincial town of Rimini. “One of the screen’s great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men” (Chicago Tribune). 
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Sunday, January 26, 2020
1:30 PM
(89 mins)
This collection of short works finds Varda observing people, spaces, and places from France to Iran, in L’opéra-Mouffe, Du côté de la côte, La réponse de femmes, Plaisir d’amour en Iran, Ulysse, and Les dites cariatides.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
3:30 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1960,
(174 mins)

The May 16 screening has been canceled. Learn more

BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Film to Table dinner follows the January 26 screening

Marcello Mastroianni stars as a jaded reporter drawn to the decadence of Rome in Fellini’s masterpiece, filled with jaw-dropping set pieces of both excess and warmth. “Fellini’s bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting” (Time Out). 
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7 PM
Sunday, January 26, 2020
7 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1999,
(111 mins)
An elderly man drives his lawn mower across the Midwest to see his ailing brother in Lynch’s atypically sweet-natured work, released by Walt Disney Pictures. “It may be my most experimental film,” Lynch claimed.
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Monday, January 27, 2020
6:30 PM
The director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at UC Berkeley discusses the challenges of developing expressive robotic systems to integrate with natural counterparts.
Free admission. Doors open at 6 PM.
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3:10 PM
  • Film
  • In-Person
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
3:10 PM
Roberto Rossellini,
Italy,
1945,
(102 mins)

Digital Restoration

Open City also screens Saturday, February 22 (without lecture).

A group of women and children (led by a charismatic Anna Magnani) try to shelter resistance forces from the Nazis. Rossellini’s moving, inspiring, and agonizing neorealist classic was cowritten by Fellini.
Special admission: 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.
  • Russell Merritt
    Lecture
    Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years. 
7 PM
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
7 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1990,
(127 mins)

Wild at Heart also screens Friday, February 14, with an introduction by Barry Gifford.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.
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Thursday, January 30, 2020
12 PM
Author Jeff Chang gives a talk drawing on his award-winning book We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation.
Free admission
5 PM
  • In-Person
  • Reading
Thursday, January 30, 2020
5 PM
Artist Anne Walsh introduces her new book Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh, a visual and textual response to Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet.
Included with admission
Series Readings 2020
7 PM
  • Film
Thursday, January 30, 2020
7 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1985,
(105 mins)

Digital Restoration

The short life and eventual death of a young female drifter forms the basis of Varda’s chilling look at alienation and idealism. “Like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person” (Roger Ebert).
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5 PM
Friday, January 31, 2020
5 PM
Agnès Varda, JR,
France,
2017,
(89 mins)

BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Varda teams up with hipster artist JR on a road trip across rural France, meeting the locals and creating large-scale portraits. One of Varda’s last films, and a first-rate achievement in her brilliant career.
7 PM
Friday, January 31, 2020
7 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1986,
(120 mins)

Digital Restoration

Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 
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3 PM
Saturday, February 1, 2020
3 PM
Agnès Varda,
France,
1955,
(80 mins)

BAMPFA Collection

Made outside the French film industry on a shoestring budget, Varda’s debut film about two reunited lovers in a Mediterranean fishing port has been called “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”
5:30 PM
  • Film
Saturday, February 1, 2020
5:30 PM
Federico Fellini,
Italy,
1954,
(108 mins)

La strada also screens Wednesday, February 26, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, modeled her timeless character Gelsomina after Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. She stars with a brutish Anthony Quinn in this classic that Martin Scorsese has called “the cornerstone of Fellini’s work.”
8 PM
Saturday, February 1, 2020
8 PM
David Lynch,
United States,
1986,
(120 mins)

Digital Restoration

Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin).