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Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
In person: Q&A with UCLA Cinema and Media Studies Professor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli and Université Paris Cité Visual Studies Professor Martine Beugnet.
While the white sheet has become an icon of the returning dead, it also stands in the place of projection. The sheet, stretched like a translucent canvas, is a reminder of the first public exhibitions where shadowy figures suddenly appeared on or behind its surface. The screen, like the sheet, becomes the membrane through and onto which the figure of the ghost takes shape, confounding our ability to distinguish the figure (the ghost-as-sheet) from the ground (the screen-as-sheet). But while the sheet may serve as the connective tissue between a living audience and the dead, the image or shadows that congregate on screen stir up trouble for the living. Tonight’s films explore the convergence of touch (or the inability to touch) with the ghostly and our changing relationship with the past and the dead.—Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Martine Beugnet
Screening 1 of 2
How to Save a Dead Friend
Year: 2022 Country: France / Germany / Norway / Sweden Language: Russian with English subtitles Runtime: 103 min. Digital. Color.
Over a 12-year span (2004–2016), Marusya Syroechkovskaya documented her relationship with Kimi, the young man who became her friend, companion and husband. While documentary practice became the filmmaker’s lifeline, Kimi, like so many young Russians growing up under an increasingly autocratic regime, was caught in a spiral of self-destruction and drug addiction. The film’s subtitle, a message from a silenced generation, signals the refusal to provide any closure that would exorcise ghosts and free oneself from the past. Instead, the filmmaker creates a space where a dead friend returns to tell a story that is also the story of a lost generation.
Director/screenwriter: Marusya Syroechkovskaya. With: Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Kirill Morev.
Screening 2 of 2
A Ghost Story
Year: 2017 Country: U.S. Language: English Runtime: 93 min. Digital. Color.
A Ghost Story is unusual in its use of the now dated, shrouded ghost, featuring Casey Affleck donning a plain white sheet with two black holes in lieu of eyes. While a deceptively simple narrative — a man (known only as C) dies and returns to haunt the house he lived in with his wife (M, played by Rooney Mara) — the film’s poignancy stems from its account of loss and grief, the cohabitation of death and life epitomized by the sharing of a mundane household object, and the sheet that hides and reveals live, inanimate and absent bodies.
Director/Screenwriter: David Lowery. With: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara.
