Schedule
BERKS FILMMAKERS Fall / Winter Schedule Also available in PDF format
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Winter/Spring 2010 SCHEDULE FOR BFI

FEBRUARY

23 TUESDAY 29th BLACK MARIA FILM/VIDEO FESTIVAL: JOHN COLUMBUS in person
A juried national tour reflecting the imaginative work being done by experimental and independent film & video makers today. JOHN COLUMBUS, the festival’s founder and director, will present a selection of prizewinners representing a wide range of styles and genres from this year’s competition. Program will include, Is What Was by Berks co-founder Jerry Tartaglia who will be present to introduce his work.

MARCH

2 TUESDAY IN A LONELY PLACE
In a Lonely Place 1950, 94 min.) by NICOLAS RAY, This film, by one of Hollywood’s greatest directors has been described as deep depiction of the hell of alcoholism, others have described it as a film “with not only a cynical view of Hollywood but also one with a central character that is figured with ambiguity and complexity, from which the film draws incredibly poignant and intense tension, that is unusual for Hollywood. Ray's film is one of the finest noir melodramas Hollywood ever produced; it is a film in which all elements - performance, story, score, lighting and editing - work in complete concert to realize the emotional weight of its drama. “- Fiona A. Villella, Senses of Cinema. "... [Bogart] played one fascinatingly complex character...in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey's own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character's, the screenwriter’s pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart." — Louise Brooks

9 TUESDAY WENDY AND LUCY
Wendy and Lucy (2008, 80 min.) by KELLY REICHARDT “A pitch-perfect triumph... In the space of a few years, Ms. Reichardt...has become one of the most interesting young American filmmakers. Her latest follows Wendy (Ms. Williams), a girlish woman with watchful eyes and a hesitant smile, who, with her mutt, Lucy, is on her way to a new life in Alaska with too little money when she runs into trouble in Oregon. With uninflected realism, an attentive camera and no weeping strings, Ms. Reichardt makes palpably, tragically real what it means to be struggling at the very edge of the economic abyss.”- Manohla Dargis, New York Times. Describing Michell William’s performance, “What may emerge as the best performance of the year. Among the loveliest films at Cannes.” - Amy Taubin, Film Comment

23 TUESDAY TAKA IIMURA in person
TAKA IIMURA (Tokyo), one of the pioneers and still very active parishioners of avant-garde media (film/video) will present, VITAL SIGNS: THE LANGUAGE OF TECHNOLOGY (1966-1977, 88 min.), a program of early video from America and Japan, (a considerable portion of which is his own early work) highlighting the significant parallel developments in media in these countries during the 1960's and 70's. Following the introduction of the first consumer-grade video recorder, the Portapak by Sony in the mid-1960's, artists and non-artists participated in a fertile time of creative exploration and experimentation with the new technology. The birthplace of video, was of special interest during the 1960's and 70's there were many instances of exchange between artists from Japan and the U.S. Advances in the aesthetics of video were largely inspired by the collaboration of Nam June Paik, a Korean living in New York, and the Tokyo-based engineer Shuya Abe. Early performance works by New York artist Joan Jonas were influenced by the work she saw on a trip to Japan. Prominent Japanese artists such as Takahiko Iimura and Shigeko Kubota came to the U.S. and were widely exhibited. Artists included: Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, Toshio Matsumoto, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Keigo Yamamoto, James Byrne, Takahiko Iimura, Kohel Ando, Morihiro Wada. (This program comes out of a collaboration of the Yokohama Museum in Japan, a team of Japanese curators and the Electronic Arts Intermix.)

30 TUESDAY TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Trouble in Paradise (1932, 83 min.) by ERNST LUBITSCH. “There is no Hollywood movie more insouciantly amoral than Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 Trouble in Paradise. Released in the depths of the Great Depression, Lubitsch's urbane comedy concerns a swank pair of thieves, played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins, who not only live together in sin but–after successfully fleecing Kay Francis's rich and equally charming widow–taxi off into the sunset utterly unrepentant. ... Hedonism was never more nonchalant. ... Style is substance in Lubitsch's instantly recognized masterpiece: "As close to perfection as anything I have ever seen in the movies," the young Dwight Macdonald wrote in a little literary magazine. Indeed, style is morality.”-J. Hoberman, Village Voice

APRIL

6 TUESDAY MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
Manufactured Landscapes (2006, 80 min.) by Jennifer Baichwal. The famous Canadian photographer, Andrew Burtynsky “and an indefinite number of helpers trot across China taking glossy, large-format, generally long-view color photographs of factories, welding sites and recycling centers, with an abbreviated side trip to the Bangladesh coast where young men disassemble oil tankers, at times ankle-deep in sludge.... Sensitively shot in 16-millimeter film by Peter Mettler, “Manufactured Landscapes” (which is also the name of a 2003 book of Mr. Burtynsky’s photographs) is partly a Great Man documentary, a record of an artist immortalized at the moment of creation: point, shoot, viola! Rather more interestingly, at times, it also appears to be a rather tentative, perhaps even unconscious, critique of that same artist and his vision.”- Manohla Dargis, New York Times

13 TUESDAY BLACK GIRL
Black Girl (1966, 65min.) by OUSMANE SEMBENE “Africa’s foremost filmmaker. Osmane Sembène (1923-2007), directed not only the first African feature film, but also the continent’s first color movie and the first shot in an indigenous language... by the early 60s, was recognized as a major African novelist. But pushing forty, and realizing that literature had a limited audience in Africa, he went back to (film) school, with his efforts winning awards at festivals around the world and bringing international attention to sub-Saharan African cinema. In his nine features he was not only a sharp critic of the internal problems of modern Africa, but also a passionate advocate of African pride and autonomy. ...In Black Girl Diouana finds her pleasant babysitting chores for a French family in Dakar topped by an invitation to accompany them back to France; but once there, she finds she’s just “the black girl.” Based on an actual event, Sembène’s first feature combines the semi-doc technique of neo-realism with the simple, freewheeling style of the early New Wave in an unsparing attack on neo-colonial exploitation that put African cinema on the map. With Sembène himself as a schoolteacher.” — program notes by Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum (NYC). Albright Prof., Mary Jane Androne, PhD, who recently participated in a Fulbright Seminar in Dakar, will give a short introduction to the film. (French with English titles)

15 THURSDAY OPEN SCREENING
Bring your own films or tapes; all works will be screened.

20 TUESDAY BRAND UPON THE BRAIN
Brand Upon the Brain (2006, 99 min.) by GUY MADDEN “A house painter named Guy Maddin comes home after 30 years to fulfill his dying mother's request that he repaint the sinister orphanage she runs inside a lighthouse. The kids all have mysterious holes in their heads, and additional intrigues involve a teenage sleuth and a harpist posing as her brother. Enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited.”- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (The film’s narration is read by poet, John Ashbery.)

27 TUESDAY THE BIRDS
The Birds (1963, 120 min.) by ALFRED HITCHCOCK This “apocalyptic poem,” as Fellini described it, is “Hitchcock's most abstract film ... and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings. As emblems of sexual tension, divine retribution, meaningless chaos, metaphysical inversion, and aching human guilt, his attacking birds acquire a metaphorical complexity and slipperiness worthy of Melville. Tippi Hedren's lead performance is still open to controversy, but her evident stage fright is put to sublimely Hitchcockian uses. With Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, and Jessica Tandy.”- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

MAY

4 TUESDAY CALIFORNIA CLASSICS, ALBERT KILCHESTY in person
ALBERT KILCHESTY (Portland, Oregon) Albert Kilchesty will present a program of selected 20th century avant-garde films made in California. Program will include short works by Chick Strand, Bruce Baillie, Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner, Oskar Fischinger, James Broughton, Chris MacLaine and others. Kilchesty, a super-8 filmmaker and writer about film, was Director of LA. Filmforum (1986-1990) where he programmed, screened and wrote about the works of numerous experimental films and filmmakers. In addition to his work in L.A., Kilchesty taught film at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1998 he edited (and authored an essay in) the catalog, “Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films,” a major historical survey of small-gauge film and video, that took place at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in a series of 50 programs. Kilchesty was a very active member of Berks Filmmakers during the early years of its history. He presently is Archivist/Historian for the Baseball Reliquary, (Monrovia, CA.)

11 TUESDAY GOMORRAH
Gomorrah (2008, 37 mins) by MATTEO GARRONE “...[each of the characters] we follow in Garrone’s adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s 2006 book on the Camorra thugs plaguing Naples resides on the lower end of the criminal food chain. The more we see how delusions of grandeur and desperation force average citizens into increasingly dead-end situations, the clearer Gomorrah’s bigger picture becomes. Never mind the world of bada-bing and overstylized bang-bang that you normally associate with Mafia epics. This is a portrait of a region so infected with corruption that the infrastructure is rotting from the inside out. ... A longtime social realist who isn’t above dropping in bits of guilty-pleasure grotesquerie, Matteo Garrone had already established himself as one of the few notable talents in contemporary Italian cinema. ... His deft handling of multiple perspectives and deconstruction of screen myths suggests that he’s a born maker of mosaic movies. Every story strand informs the others, creating a devastating 360-degree view of how organized crime impacts the country’s everyday people. Once the shooting stops, all that’s left is the damage done.”- David Fear, Time Out New York (2008 Grand Prize Winner, Cannes Film Festival; and Independent Sprit Award for Best Foreign Film) (Italian with English titles)

13 THURSDAY BERKS AREA FILM & VIDEO SHOW
Recent works in various media by local film and video artists and students; makers will be present to introduce their work.