Reverse Angle: Cinema Looks at Itself

January 20–April 1, 2018

This rich array of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works interrogates film as a medium and asks what cinema’s social and cultural role is or could be.

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Notfilm
A Useful Life
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Sacred Places
The Thoughts That Once We Had
Two Marxists in Hollywood

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Past Films

A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood
- Sunday, April 1 7 PM
Experimental filmmaker Zoe Beloff revisits the Hollywood exile of two revolutionaries—Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht—in an illustrated presentation and a trilogy of short films.

Zoe Beloff in Person
Salaam Cinema
- Saturday, March 31 7:30 PM
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Iran, 1995
Acclaimed Iranian director Makhmalbaf blurs the line between fiction and reality by turning a casting call into cinema, and his prospective actors into subjects, in this tribute to (and wry jab at) the power of film. “Witty and slyly relevant” (Variety).
The Thoughts That Once We Had
- Sunday, March 18 7 PM
Thom Andersen
United States, 2015
The film essayist behind Red Hollywood and Los Angeles Plays Itself returns with this personal history of cinema, inspired by Gilles Deleuze. “Less a lecture than a wordless, associative, haunted journey not just through the history of cinematic innovation, but through the 20th century itself” (The Guardian).
Sacred Places
- Sunday, March 4 7 PM
Jean-Marie Téno
Cameroon, France, 2009
A bootleg DVD, an old TV, and beat-up benches are all you need to keep cinema alive—at least in one run-down Burkinabe neighborhood—in Téno’s tribute to African hustle and cinephilia. With Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic’s Ed and Pauline and Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town.

Christian Bruno, Natalija Vekic, and Emily Chao in Person
Cinema: A Public Affair
- Thursday, February 22 7 PM
Tatiana Brandrup
Germany, 2015
This profile of Naum Kleiman, an acclaimed film historian and former director of Moscow’s Cinema Museum and Eisenstein Center, celebrates “a modest, inspiring cultural figure [with a] conviction that cinema can be used to construct a free civil society” (Hollywood Reporter).
Notfilm
- Friday, February 16 7 PM
Ross Lipman
United States, 2015
Lipman’s fascinating kino-essay examines a 1965 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. “Testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema” (New York Times). With the original article: Samuel Beckett’s Film.
A Film Unfinished
- Sunday, February 4 7 PM
Yaël Hersonski
Israel, 2010
BAMPFA Collection

A remarkable examination of what happens when a film on the Warsaw Ghetto, discovered shortly after World War II and thought to be documentary footage, turns out to be an unfinished propaganda film.

Introduction by William Guynn
A Useful Life
- Sunday, January 28 7 PM
Federico Veiroj
Uruguay, 2010
BAMPFA Collection

A lifelong film archivist faces a new beginning with the threatened closure of his institution in this loving black-and-white ode to a life lived among the reels. “An elegy to cinephilia” (Slant). With Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge and Alexi Manis’s Luminous.
Dawson City: Frozen Time
- Sunday, January 21 6:30 PM
Bill Morrison
United States, 2017
Bill Morrison presents his beautiful meditation on a rare trove of silent nitrate film, as well as the barren Canadian Yukon town where it was found. “Both awe-inspiring and humbling” (New York Times).

Bill Morrison in Person
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
- Saturday, January 20 6 PM
Chris Marker
France, 2000
Film to Table dinner follows

Chris Marker’s cinematic psalm to Andrei Tarkovsky transports the viewer into Tarkovsky’s films and his world. With Marker’s short on the Russian director Alexander Medvedkin, The Train Rolls On.

Reverse Angle: Cinema Looks at Itself

January 20–April 1, 2018

What is the function of cinema in our daily lives and in society? What is it capable of? This series features films that interrogate the medium, asking just such questions of archivists, programmers, filmmakers, and films themselves, finding answers that are passionate, precise, and unexpected. In Cinema: A Public Affair, Naum Kleiman speculates that “cinema has the ability to turn people into citizens,” an idea at the core of his philosophy as director of the Moscow State Central Cinema Museum. A Useful Life, Federico Veiroj’s tender appreciation of a dying Uruguayan cinematheque, takes us behind the screen and into the daily life of a film programmer. Ross Lipman says of his new film: “Notfilm asks, as Beckett did, what cinema can tell us of the human experience. It aspires, as Beckett did, to Joyce’s dictum that artworks should not be about things, but be things themselves.” In different ways, Chris Marker’s love letter to Andrei Tarkovsky, Yaël Hersonski’s interrogation of Nazi propaganda, and Thom Andersen’s film essay inspired by Gilles Deleuze teach us how to look attentively and thoughtfully at cinema, while Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time and Zoe Beloff’s A World Redrawn project look at lost or unrealized films and add to our knowledge of film history. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema and Jean-Marie Téno’s Sacred Places beautifully celebrate a passion for cinema. This rich array of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works is an invitation to ponder big questions about why we look at film, how contemplation enhances our capacity to think and feel, and what cinema’s social and cultural role is or could be.

Kathy Geritz, Film Curator

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