FILM SCREENINGS ::::
All screenings will take place at SFAI Lecture Hall.
The events are free and open to the public.
September 3rd, 7:30pm
Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970, US
Lured to the United States by an ambitious MGM, Antonioni set about coolly redefining California dreaming in this wander through a Los Angeles baking in its own heat—from both the cultures within it and the deserts that surround it. Studio executives may have hoped for some marketable sex from the counterculture plotline involving a tight-jeaned, plane-thieving rebel and a leggy, well-tanned hippie child, but Antonioni amusingly appears more aroused by the landscapes—the manmade urban realm seen and heard through a blur of industrial signs, salvage yards, and the ambient din of clattering machines and humans, and the vast natural setting just outside the city, the desert mirages of Death Valley’s heat and light. Cued to an appropriately sedated soundtrack of Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia, Zabriskie Point is grounded in the realities of radical sixties American culture, and ecstatically detached—in thought, aesthetics, and narrative concerns—from the Hollywood system.
—Jason Sanders
Written by Antonioni, Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peplo. Photographed by Alfio Contini. With Mark Frechette, Daria Helprin, Rod Taylor, Kathleen Cleaver. (107 mins, Color, VHS, From Warner Bros.)
September 8th, 7:30pm
La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, France
In an apartment defaced with political graffiti, Godard’s “petit Maoists” debate the principles of the Cultural Revolution, their shortwave tuned to Radio Peking. This Parisian cell, consisting of five young people—Veronique, a student; Guillaume, an actor; Henri, a chemical engineer; Kirilov, an artist, and Yvonne, a country girl—deliberates the need for action while gorged on the predigested language of revolution. In an almost slapstick assemblage of skits that joins Pop to agitprop, La Chinoise charts the progress of these radicals as they veer from playing at revolution to making it. All the while, Godard advances his self-possessed film forward with a lucidity of means that refuses distraction. La Chinoise speaks first as a prophetic clarification of brooding unrest, soon verified by May ’68, and then as a vehicle for radical theater seeking use beyond reflection. “OK, it’s fiction,” says one cell member, “but it brings me closer to reality.”
—Steve Seid
Written by Godard. Photographed by Raoul Coutard. With Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michel Semeniako. (99 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, DVD, From Koch Lorber)
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Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise (1967), image credit courtesty of Koch Lorber Films/Koch Entertainment
Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point (1970), image credit courtesy of Swank Motion Pictures, Inc.
Chris Marker, A Grin Without a Cat (1977/1988), image credits courtesy of Icarus Film
September 10th, 7:30pm
A Grin Without a Cat, Chris Marker, 1977/1988, France
~This film will be introduced by SFAI President, Chris Bratton~
(Le fond de l'air est rouge. Part One: Fragile Hands; Part Two: Severed Hands). In 1968, revolution was in the air in Paris, Peking, Prague, and Peoria. But was it on the ground? That is the fundamental question energizing this remarkable essay by the inimitable, satiric, and fully fomented Chris Marker. Agitprop of an idiosyncratic nature, it begins with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, specifically the Odessa Steps, an image of the masses being routed. Over the next three hours, Marker synthesizes what is ultimately a postcolonial struggle, or “third world war,” igniting throughout the globe. The Vietnam War is central to this struggle, its injurious excess mobilizing the New Left. But through outtakes, newsreels, interviews, amateur footage, and wire photos, Marker makes wicked connections to the death of Che Guevara, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the souring of the Olympics, Allende’s U.S.-backed assassination, and, of course, the grand barricades of Paris. With barbs that sting both Left and Right and a penchant for the poetic, Marker’s sweeping ciné-tract is about not the proper path but the transformation achieved along the way.
—Steve Seid
Written, edited by Marker. (178 mins, In French, Spanish, and other languages with English voice-over and subtitles, Color, 3/4-inch Video, permission First Run/Icarus)
All film notes courtesy of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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