The intertwining of free speech, knowledge, the diversity of information, and the challenges to what we know and what we would like to know is all contained in libraries – we can just step into one and ask. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has an ongoing project, called Public Knowledge, which is soon to feature a film series based on libraries as carriers of that mission. Over the weekend of September 22-23, and free to the public, SFMOMA will be offering the classic, Fahrenheit 451, and several other films worth an afternoon for a double-bill, including Bette Davis as a librarian fighting the tides of McCarthyism. By happenstance or by synchronicity, both SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive will be showing Ex Libris, the Frederick Wiseman documentary on the New York Public Library the same afternoon.
The extracts below and fuller information can be found at the SFMOMA site: https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/added-value/libraries-in-the-movies/
San Francisco: SFMOMA: Saturday, Sept. 22 -23, 2018
Saturday, September 22: 12:30pm
Toute la Mémoire du Monde. Alain Resnais, 1956, 22 minutes.
“Toute la Mémoire du Monde is both a look at the inner workings of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and a meditative piece about the fragility of human memory and the ways in which we try to support it.”
Also available through the Criterion Collection here.
Saturday, September 22: 1:30 p.m.
Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library. Frederick Wiseman, 2017, 197 minutes
“Frederick Wiseman’s film, Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library, goes behind the scenes of one of the greatest knowledge institutions in the world and reveals it as a place of welcome, cultural exchange, and learning.”
Sunday, September 23, 12:30 p.m.
Storm Center. Daniel Taradash, 1956, 85 minutes
“Filmed in Santa Rosa, California, the film stars Bette Davis as the small town librarian who fights the city council when asked to withdraw the book The Communist Dream from the library’s collection. This was among the first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood exploring the effects on the free circulation of ideas and the damage that can be done to an individual and to a community when this freedom is challenged.”
Sunday, September 23, 2:30 p.m.
Fahrenheit 451. François Truffaut, 1966, 112 minutes
“Based on the author Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, this film is set in a future where the possession of books is considered a crime by the government whose squad of firefighters sets out to destroy the illicit literature with flamethrowers. Fahrenheit 451, it is explained, is the temperature at which books are reduced to ashes.”
Berkeley: BAMPFA: Saturday, September 22, 2018
Saturday, September 22, 2:00 pm. Tickets $9.00-$13.00.
Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library. Frederick Wiseman, 2017, 197 minutes
As part of the BAMPFA Frederick Wiseman festival, another showing of Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library is offered on the opposite side of the Bay, in Berkeley, on Saturday afternoon, September 22nd. The Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive will be featuring Ex-Libris at 2:00 p.m., at a ticket rate of $9.00-$13.00. The price of a ticket also includes admission to the BAM galleries and a 10% discount at Babette Café. Information and tickets at: https://bampfa.org/event/evening-frederick-wiseman
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