Our Art Saturday programs are free and meet above the waterfall in Yerba Buena Gardens (Mission between 3rd and 4th Streets) between 10:45 and 11:15. No need to RSVP. Students tour downtown art galleries and museums to take in the very latest in contemporary art before they are treated to a picnic lunch. After lunch we go see a new release film. A cultural education unlike any other!

Cine/Club is free and is held on Friday nights. These events are free to students, their guests, mentors, parents and friends of Art & Film. No need to RSVP. Screenings are held at the Randall Museum (199 Museum Way) and at Dolby Labs (100 Potrero Avenue). Refreshments are served at 6:30 and the film begins at 7 unless otherwise noted.

Discussions are held after each film, led by Ronald Chase, director of Art & Film, and guest moderators such as Heather Woodward of SotA and Jeanne Finley of CCA.



Friday 20: Cine/Club: Randall Museum

Wong Kar Wai's CHUNKING EXPRESS (1994, China)

The story of two couples searching for love, this film is filled with charm, humor splashes of irony, and gorgeous visual imagery. The two interact with a chain of lonely characters. It’s a masterful delight.
WHY WE CHOSE THIS FILM:

Ironically, Wai began Chunking Express to take is mind of the many setbacks and delays on his film Ashes of Time. The story of two policemen and their romantic attachments seemed to be a mere diversion, but in the long run it turned out to be his most popular film of the 90’s. There is a playfulness to the romances, but also the film has all the edgy violence (seldom on camera), the passages of longing and loss that give all his films their emotional strength. We think you’ll be fascinated.
   
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR:

Wong Kar Wai is another director with a terrific track record in film. His early films from the 80’s and early 90’s captured an international audience of young enthusiasts—his mixture of romance and gangster violence, of an unusual color palette, radical framing, marvelous movement has made him one of the most influential of the film makers to come out of Hong Kong. A favorite of Quentin Tarantino, who helped Chunking Express get distributed in America, his later films, 2046, Eros, and My Blueberry Nights illustrate his evolving technical brilliance.

Saturday 21: Art Saturday

10:30 Meet on the balcony outside Metreon overlooking Yerba Buena Park (on Mission between 3rd & 4th)
11:00 We'll go see galleries, followed by a picnic lunch and see a film in the afternoon.
Friday 27: Cine/Club: Dolby Labs

Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (1979, Russia)

A different kind of science fiction. The “Stalker” works as a guide who leads people through the "the Zone" — an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings, where normal laws of physics no longer apply — to encounter "the Room," a place said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. Explores some of the big questions we ask ourselves.
WHY WE CHOSE THIS FILM:

Stalker is one of the simplest and easiest of Tarkarvsky’s films to watch. It move very much like a science fiction thriller, with a philosophical twist. At some point in the future, there is a protected place called the Zone. A bunker in the zone is said to have magical qualities, and many people risk their lives to find it. Few return. We think this combination of suspense film with inigmatic subject matter will intrigue you.
   
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR:

Certain film makers become legends in their own time, and certainly Tarkovsky was one. Some of it had to do with the scope and philosophical bent of his films. He is the most radical and unorthadox of all Russian film makers. How could he get away with this? As his films became more obtuse, difficult, strange and haunting his reputation rose and his films created a deep divide in the new, developing legions of film fans.
 
Tarkovsky became the symbol as the film maker as artist—no compromises, intense vision department. He didn’t make many films: Ivan's Childhood, The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. That’s it. He was the son of a well-known Russian poet, and his father’s poetry is often used as voice over in his films. Andrei Rublev is the exception to all this, as it is a violently realistic depiction of life in the middle ages in Russia. Banned by the Soviets (they didn’t understand it but knew, somehow, it must be dangerous) from 1966 until '71 when in made its debut at Cannes and caused a sensation. Tarkovsky fled Russia and finished his last three films in Europe. He is considered among the handful of important directors of the late 20th century.