Radical Visions Cinema Club

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

In honor of National Poetry Month SFPL screens A Quiet Passion, the acclaimed biographical film about the American poet Emily Dickinson.

A Quiet Passion presents the story of American poet Emily Dickinson, from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist. Written and directed by British filmmaker Terence Davies, the film stars Cynthia Nixon as the mature poet and co-stars Emma Bell as young Dickinson and Keith Carradine as the poet's father.
Director: Terence Davies

PG-13, 125 mins., 2016. Closed captions (CC) in English.

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see the provocative anthology film Germany in Autumn, made by eleven directors of the New German Cinema. 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.

" Germany in Autumn, a collaborative effort of eleven of the leading filmmakers of the New German Cinema, reflects on the tragic events of autumn 1977, when a public official was kidnapped and executed by members of the Baader-Meinhof Group. It contains a startling and revealing autobiographical sequence by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who turns the camera mercilessly on himself in his exploration of private and public fascism. Shot in his apartment, this thirty-minute sequence near the beginning of the film provides a setting for the whole enterprise. It is an unblinking portrait of the artist as a powerless intellectual, and of the powerless intellectual as a personal tyrant.”—Pacific Film Archive

Join us at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive when we see Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s acclaimed 2017 feature film, Zama. This film is part of the PFA’s month-long Martel retrospective: Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común. NOTE: It is highly recommended that you purchase tickets in advance.

"Adapted from the 1956 novel by Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto, Zama is a Buñuelian glimpse into a colonial abyss via the mind and body of Don Diego de Zama. An officer of the Spanish crown stationed at a remote proto-Paraguayan outpost, Zama exists in perpetual anticipation of his transfer home. Martel describes Zama as a ‘man trapped in who he thinks he is,’ and over the course of the film, we observe his struggle to preserve his morality, identity, and sanity while waiting interminably for relocation.”—Pacific Film Archive