Radical Visions Cinema Club

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see Young Törless, German director Volker Schlöndorff’s debut feature film. This film is part of the PFA’s months-long Fassbinder and the New German Cinema retrospective. NOTE: It is recommended that you purchase tickets in advance.

"After working with Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, Volker Schlöndorff released this astonishingly assured first feature (working with a mainly non-professional cast) to universal critical acclaim. Based on a novel by Robert Musil about one boy’s unwitting involvement in the rituals of sadism and suppression in a turn-of-the-century boarding-school, it is filmed in a stark, almost documentary style fitting to its subject, playing up the allegorical potential of a power game of activity and passivity in a totalitarian little-world. Törless, despite his distance and inactivity, finds himself an accomplice: ‘We are neither good nor bad, but defined solely in action’” (Richard Kwietniowski)." — Pacific Film Archive

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, a moving film by German directors Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. This film is part of the PFA’s months-long Fassbinder and the New German Cinema retrospective. NOTE: It is recommended that you purchase tickets in advance.

"Adapted from the Heinrich Böll novel which was in turn based on a real incident, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has frequently been compared with Costa-Gavras’ film Z for its pace and implications as a political thriller. After sleeping with an army deserter and suspected terrorist, a domestic servant finds herself persecuted and victimized by a police investigation and subsequent press coverage which turns her past into lurid sensationalism. . . . Coming after the post-Watergate glorification of the role of the press as ‘truth-tellers’, the film unabashedly makes its target the dubious practices of the right-wing German tabloid press” (Richard Kwietniowski).— Pacific Film Archive

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s melodramatic Fear of Fear. This film is part of the PFA’s months-long Fassbinder and the New German Cinema retrospective. NOTE: It is recommended that you purchase tickets in advance.

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder trades on the tricks of his Hollywood mentors, especially Douglas Sirk, in creating an always sunlit environment for his heroine, the ‘perfect’ middle-class wife and mother, to go mad in. Soon after the birth of her child, Margot (Margit Carstensen) experiences a depression that is exacerbated by her fear that she is becoming schizophrenic. Disproving Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous axiom, Fear of Fear is more than an examination of free-floating anxiety; rather, as Vincent Canby noted, “it is about the autumn of materialism in the form of an intensely personal case history . . . everything is perfect for Margot, yet nothing works.”—Pacific Film Archive

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see German director Alexander Kluge’s debut feature film, Yesterday Girl, and Richard Linklater’s animated Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly. Kluge’s film is part of the PFA’s months-long Fassbinder and the New German Cinema retrospective. Linklater’s film is part of the PFA’s months-long Psychedelia & Cinema film series. NOTE: It is recommended that you purchase tickets in advance.

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder trades on the tricks of his Hollywood mentors, especially Douglas Sirk, in creating an always sunlit environment for his heroine, the ‘perfect’ middle-class wife and mother, to go mad in. Soon after the birth of her child, Margot (Margit Carstensen) experiences a depression that is exacerbated by her fear that she is becoming schizophrenic. Disproving Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous axiom, Fear of Fear is more than an examination of free-floating anxiety; rather, as Vincent Canby noted, “it is about the autumn of materialism in the form of an intensely personal case history . . . everything is perfect for Margot, yet nothing works.”—Pacific Film Archive