New PFA Schedule

Just as I started to write again, a new Pacific Film Archive schedule shows up in the mail. Plenty of stuff I’d like to see.

They’ve got a Ingrid Bergman festival with an interesting twist: nothing from Hollywood. Between November 4 and December 17, the PFA will screen nine  European features (and one collection of shorts) made in Europe before or after her 1940’s American heyday, ranging from the 1936 Intermezzo that made her a star (it was remade in Hollywood in 1939—her first American film) to her last theatrical feature, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. (Curious how her career is bookended by two films where she played a classical pianist, each with a music reference title.) Other films include a 1935 sex comedy called Walpurgis Night and Stromboli, her first collaboration with Roberto Rossellini (Isabelle Rossellini is another of their collaborations, and they’re extramarital affair destroyed Bergman’s American career).

A series on torture (Watching the Unwatchable) includes Errol Morris’ excellent Standard Operating Procedure and Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment. There’s a series on New Spanish Cinema.

It wouldn’t be a PFA schedule without tributes to specific directors, and this time we have series for Alain Resnais, Miklós Jancsó, and Otto Preminger. The Resnais series opens with Last Year at Marienbad, which I saw in college and hated beyond measure. (I remember a friend saying it really needed a pie fight.) I’ve been thinking of giving it another chance; perhaps I’ll catch it on November 6. The Jancsó series includes The Red and the White, which the PFA screened only last year. You can read my comments here.

The series Jesters and Gestures looks at Yiddish cinema and culture. It includes Yiddish-language movies from Poland and Austria made in the 1930’s (I’ve seen several Yiddish films from that era, but only ones made in America), a 1923 silent, and more recent work.

Other interesting events include screenings of Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky and Dodard’s Made in U.S.A., introduced by choreographer Mark Morris, a Readings on Cinema screening of Psycho, and a presentation of works by early cinema pioneer Alexander Black.