Filmscreenings

Thursday 18:00, April 27, 2006
Hiroshima, Mon Amour / Hiroshima, My Love (Alain Resnais, 1959, France, 86 min, in French with English subtitles)
A cornerstone film of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais’ first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork.

Thursday 18:00, May 4, 2006
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1964, 93 min, in English)
U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper sends his bomber wing to destroy the U.S.S.R. He suspects that the communists are conspiring to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people. The U.S. president meets with his advisors, where the Soviet ambassador tells him that if the U.S.S.R. is hit by nuclear weapons, it will trigger a "Doomsday Machine" which will destroy all plant and animal life on Earth. Peter Sellers portrays the three men who might avert this tragedy: British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, the only person with access to the demented Gen. Ripper; U.S. President Merkin Muffley, whose best attempts to divert disaster depend on placating a drunken Soviet Premier and the former Nazi genius Dr. Strangelove, who concludes that "such a device would not be a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious". Will the bombers be stopped in time, or will General Jack Ripper succeed in destroying the world?

Thursday 18:00, May 11, 2006
The Atomic Cafe (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty, 1982, USA, 88 min, in English)
A sometimes hilarious, sometimes sobering collection of film clips taken from American propaganda films of the 1950s and 60s. The thrust of the production is to expose the misinformation and downright lies dispensed by the government concerning the atomic bomb. We are shown vignettes from such classic instructional films as Duck and Cover, wherein school children are assured that they will survive a nuclear attack simply by huddling together next to the schoolhouse wall. In another sequence, a pack of pigs are dressed in Army uniforms and left to die at "Ground Zero" during a nuclear test to see if human beings (who purportedly have the same skin consistency as pigs) could endure such an ordeal. All of these clips are combined to show how little the experts knew about atomics at the time. And even more to the heart, the point is to show the extent propaganda was used to mollify the fears of the American public, and her soldiers.

Thursday 18:00, May 18, 2006
O-BI, O-BA, The End of Civilization / O-BI, O-BA Koniec Cywilizacji (Piotr Szulkin, Poland, 1984, 85 min, in Polish with English subtitles)
Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by huddled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. Eight hundred survivors wait for a "space-Ark” to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart. Soon it turns out that the Ark was a myth devised by those in power. Still, the people live the Ark myth, decide to use guidelines from the Bible to build one themselves and start distributing seats in the rescue shuttle. Meanwhile, the concrete vault of the bunker threatens to collapse, and an engineer called Soft has to strengthen its structure. He wants to build the Ark nevertheless, but finds out that very little was left of the Bible after the war. He tries to escape using a secret airplane, but soon realizes that it has been rebuilt to resemble a fake Ark. The dome collapses, and the crowd starts running towards the light that is to bring the Ark. A grim portrait of post-apocalyptic paranoia, written under and inspired by Martial Law in Poland.

Thursday 18:00, May 25, 2006
Pripyat / Припять (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria, 1999, Russian, Ukrainian, Russian/Subtitles: English, 100 min, in Russian with English subtitles)
A portrait of the people who still live and work in the area contaminated by the explosion at the Chernobyl niclear plant in 1986. Stories of those who stayed and those who have moved back. What is it like to live with the invisible and incomprehensible danger of radioactivity? How do they deal with the after-effects of an accident, which is claimed to be "statistically imporbable''? Four protagonists tell their stories a provide a different glimse of everyday life in "their" zone.

OSA Archivum - Galeria Centralis
Budapest V., Arany János utca 32.
No entrance fee