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Film Screening | Vishniac
Feb 23 @ 4:00 pm - 5:45 pm
Film still of Mara Vishniac Kohn from “Vishniac”
A ROMAN VISHNIAC CITIES AND WARS PROGRAM
As part of programming for The Magnes’s newest exhibition, Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem 1947/1967, BAMPFA and The Magnes present a special screening of the documentary, Vishniac.
Friday, February 23, 2024 | 4:00pm
In person at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
From the cosmopolitan streets of prewar Berlin to the shtetls in Poland and Lithuania to the Princeton offices of Albert Einstein, Vishniac takes viewers on a journey through the lens of one of the foremost photographers of the twentieth century. Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) is best known for having traversed Eastern Europe from 1935 through 1938, on assignment for the American Joint Distribution Committee, to photograph Jewish life. Smuggled out of Europe during the war, the photographs are among the last images of a culture before it vanished. Laura Bialis’s documentary, with a narration by Vishniac’s daughter, Mara Kohn Vishniac, follows the full trajectory of his career as an artist and scientist who wanted to make the invisible visible and whose forays into color microscopic photography open our eyes to the hidden world around us. The Magnes is the keeper of Vishniac’s extraordinary photography collection of some thirty thousand images in the Roman Vishniac Archive.
Vishniac also screens Friday, February 4 (with special guests Laura Bialis and Veronica Selver in conversation).
Co-presented by BAMPFA and The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Special thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the Libitzky Family Foundation, Richard Nagler, and an anonymous donor for supporting the care and processing of the Roman Vishniac Archive.
Tickets: $5 – $14
If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 642-1412 (during open hours) with as much advance notice as possible. More information on accessibility services.