Organized by Laura Belik, Ph.D. Student in Architecture

The temptation is to take Bergman’s masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of...

Through creative juxtapositions of narrative and documentary elements, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker chronicle the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by a labor organization of African American laundresses formed in 1881, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of...

“A comedy that has the aura of the Prague Film School (FAMU) about it, where Holland studied, and apparently learned a great deal from Milos Forman in the process. It’s about the life, times, cares and foibles of playing theater in the deep provinces, so true to life that the viewer laughs and cries at the same time. . . . Provincial Actors offers a rib-tickling metaphor on the cultural scene in...

A forty-year-old divorced postal worker named Irena (Maria Chwalibóg), who lives on the outskirts of Wroslaw in Solidarity-era Poland, has a fairly miserable existence. Only her eight-year-old son lights up her world. Irena meets a younger man and begins a love affair, but hope for a new beginning shatters as the tale turns from bleak observation to almost Hitchcockian suspense. A Woman Alone was...

Bergman’s first feature after abandoning 35mm film for television technology, The Blessed Ones is a tale of tortured love between a middle-aged woman and a slightly younger man, and the jealousies that arise from their outward differences and internal melancholies. The schoolteacher Viveka ekes out a life, seemingly keeping on through sheer willpower; the failed theology student Sune barely has...

Visconti’s wondrous mood piece is an Elektra story of incestuous passions and family secrets, set in the crumbling Italian city of Volterra. Claudia Cardinale brings her new American husband home to meet her mother and brother on a very particular occasion: a memorial is being unveiled for her father, who died at Auschwitz. It isn’t the ghosts of the dead that haunt this home, however, but the...

Marking the 50th anniversary of May '68, this two-part documentary film offers firsthand accounts of those historic events from the individuals who were on the frontlines: politicians, law enforcement officers, and others who participated in the protests on the streets of Paris. The film shifts point of view from firsthand accounts to archival photographs, political posters and film footage,...

Organized by Laura Belik, Ph.D. Student in Architecture

Hour of the Wolf intertwines supernatural mysteries with the no less mysterious torments of creativity. Alma (Liv Ullmann) tells of her life on a remote island with her artist husband (Max von Sydow), who has disappeared, leaving only his diary. The strange occurrences she relates invoke the waking nightmares of gothic horror, yet in creating this eerie tale, Bergman drew on his own experiences...