About us
Meet others who deliberately seek out challenging foreign, avant-garde, and experimental films screened in San Francisco or Berkeley. After each film, we will get together for conversation at a cafe.
If you, like me, also enjoy thought-provoking literature, check out my Classic Literature and Cafes Club: http://www.meetup.com/Classic-Literature-and-Cafes
Upcoming events
3
Satyajit Ray’s "The Music Room"
Yerba Buena Center, 701 Mission San Francisco, CA 94103, San Francisco, CA, USJoin us for an afternoon screening of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (Jalsaghar) (1958). NOTE: Please purchase your tickets in advance at ybca.org. The screening room is small and the screening will likely sell out. Free admission to YBCA’s art galleries is included with your ticket, so you may wish to arrive early.
“In The Music Room (Jalsaghar), director Satyajit Ray brilliantly evokes the crumbling opulence of a fallen aristocrat (played by the beloved Chhabi Biswas) desperately clinging to a vanishing way of life. At the heart of his world is the music room where he once hosted lavish concerts—now a shadow of its former self, grand and ghostly. A showcase for some of India’s most celebrated musicians of the era, the film echoes GaHee Park’s aesthetic universe in its incandescent rendering of tradition meeting modernity, of social ritual, and of time, memory, and identity folded into one another.”—Program notes
More info on YBCA’s screening: https://ybca.org/event/the-music-room-through-an-open-window-film-series/
1:30 Meet at YBCA Box Office (701 Mission St. at Third) to purchase tickets and take our seats. The film starts at 2.
3:40 After the program we will meet for conversation at The Grove (690 Mission St. @ 3rd St.) for refreshments and conversation.3 attendees
Visconti's "White Nights"
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA, USJoin us at a screeing of Italian director Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of a classic Dostoyevsky tale, White Nights. NOTE: Consider purchasing your tickets in advance. Screenings sometimes sell out.
“This adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s tale about displaced, disconnected people drifting along crossing, doubling paths was shot in moody black-and-white on a soundstage simulacrum of Livorno, Italy. With it Luchino Visconti veered away from verisimilitude and toward an emphatically subjective style—from neorealism to neoromanticism. As a quiet man who accidentally befriends a troubled, lonely young woman (Maria Schell) and finds himself playing understudy for the absent object of her affections (Jean Marais), Marcello Mastroianni mingles subtly passionate yearnings with a characteristic note of annoyance. His character is both distrustful of and seduced by the romantic dreams that preoccupy the woman he loves.”—Pacific Film Archive
Pacific Film Archive Tickets, Information, and Directions: https://bampfa.org/event/white-nights
6:00 Meet at PFA's Box Office (2155 Center Street) to purchase or pick up tickets.
The film starts at 6:30
8:15 After the film we will meet at Elaichi cafe on 2161 Allston Way for conversation.2 attendees
Maurice Pialat’s “La maison des bois: Episodes 1–3”
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA, USJoin us at a rare screeing of French director Maurice Pialat’s La maison des bois: Episodes 1–3. NOTE: Consider purchasing your tickets in advance. Screenings sometimes sell out.
“Epic yet intimate, sweeping yet personal, La maison des bois stands as one of the greatest achievements in the history of television, as well as legendary director Maurice Pialat’s magnum opus. Commissioned for Télévision Française in 1971, this seven-episode, nearly four-hundred-minute miniseries considers the impact of World War I on a simple French family living in the countryside. Applying a naturalistic focus to their subject, Pialat and screenwriter René Wheeler capture both the historical scope of the conflict and the subtle ways that a small town’s quotidian routines and rituals—church, school, tavern—are indelibly touched by it. --Pacific Film Archive
Pacific Film Archive Tickets, Information, and Directions: https://bampfa.org/event/maison-des-bois-episodes-1-3
3:00 Meet at PFA's Box Office (2155 Center Street) to purchase or pick up tickets.
The film starts at 3:30.
5:30 After the film we will meet at Elaichi cafe on 2161 Allston Way for conversation.1 attendee
Past events
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