Visions of a City, Or A Weekend in San Francisco

Visions of a City, Or A Weekend in San Francisco is a film series about San Francisco as both a real place and a cinematic state of mind. The program explores the city’s history in independent, avant-garde, studio, and film noir traditions, focusing on recurring ideas of doubles, ghosts, criminal conspiracies, alienation, loss, hidden recordings, and the uncanny effects of San Francisco’s hills, fog, streets, and vertiginous heights.

The series brings together noir thrillers, psychological mysteries, science fiction, crime films, and formally adventurous city portraits. Its films range from the classic car chase and obsessive pursuit in Bullitt and Vertigo to lyrical avant-garde visions by Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, and Lawrence Jordan. The program also highlights the composers whose brooding scores helped define San Francisco on screen, including Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin, Elmer Bernstein, Franz Waxman, and Bernard Herrmann.

When: November 6–9

Venue: Harvard Film Archive

Schedule: Friday, November 6, at 7:00 p.m.: Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates, 1968. The film is followed at 9:15 p.m. by The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1974.

Saturday, November 7: Sudden Fear, directed by David Miller, 1952, at 7:00 p.m.; Experiment in Terror, directed by Blake Edwards, 1962, at 9:15 p.m.; and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman, 1978, at 11:30 p.m.

Sunday, November 8: Dark Passage, directed by Delmer Daves, 1947, at 3:00 p.m.; and The Lineup, directed by Don Siegel, 1958, at 7:00 p.m.

Monday, November 9: Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, at 7:00 p.m.

Lineup: Bullitt; The Conversation; Sudden Fear; Experiment in Terror; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Dark Passage; The Lineup; and Vertigo.

Format: The scheduled films are screening on film.

Tickets: Price not available