This series explores the centrality of moving images in such areas as the production and appropriation of space, the changing architectonics of visuality, and the fashioning of the body in film.
February 8 (Tuesday) 6:30 pm
Directed by Dziga Vertov
USSR 1928, 35mm, silent, b/w, 80 min.
Truly an experimental documentary, Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece vividly exemplifies the montage aesthetic of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, with its quick juxtaposition of shots and speeded-up and slowed-down cinematography. Using his own concept of the "Kino Eye"––the cinema’s eye, which illuminates the real world as not ordinarily seen––Vertov creates a vivid city symphony depicting an exuberant day in the life of his Moscow metropolis.
February 15 (Tuesday) 6:30 pm
February 25 (Friday) 9:30 pm
February 27 (Sunday) 8:30 pm
Directed by Samira Gloor-Fadel
Switzerland/France 1999, 35mm, b/w and color, 107 min.
With Wim Wenders, Jean Nouvel
French and German with English subtitles
This engaging nonfiction work focuses, as its title suggests, on two subjects: the meaning of cinema and the changing cityscape of Berlin. The former is addressed offscreen by the voice-over musings of Jean-Luc Godard and onscreen by the no less evocative reflections of German director Wim Wenders, who takes us on a stroll as the city of Berlin comes into intellectual focus. The French architect Jean Nouvel assists by tracing construction sites of future buildings, while Godard is heard probing the relation between German and European histories. With grace and assurance, Berlin-Cinéma addresses the ongoing social and formal dialogue between architecture and the cinema.
February 22 (Tuesday) 6:30 pm
Directed by Alain Resnais
France 1959, 35mm, b/w, 91 min.
With Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson
French with English subtitles
Resnais’s second feature film is greatly indebted to Marguerite Duras’s screenplay and is considered one of the best films of the early French New Wave. Using a radically different approach to express time difference via associative cuts that bridge the past and the present, Resnais presents the subjective point of view of a French woman, haunted by her past and the war, who falls in love with a Japanese man while filming an historical recreation of the atomic blast in Hiroshima.
February 29 (Tuesday) 6:30 pm
Directed by Roberto RosselliniItaly 1953,
35mm, b/w, 100 min.
With Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders
Tensions pile up in Rossellini’s deeply moving and beautifully nuanced story starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a frustrated and bored British couple struggling to keep their marriage alive while visiting Naples. The film resembles a diary as it meditates on the problems of the jaded communication between the spouses. Rossellini stated that "it was very important for me to show Italy, Naples and that strange atmosphere in which is found a very real, very immediate feeling: the feeling of eternal life, something that has entirely disappeared from the world."
Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library.
Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College.