Halloween Films
Friday, October 31, 2008
7:30pm

Experience Halloween — Exploratorium style. As a part of the its Phantasmagorium of spooky science and frightful fun, the Exploratorium screens two Halloween Night Films, beginning at 7:30pm. This event is open to the public and included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium. The schedule is as follows:

In Shelf Life (2008, 29 min.), filmmaker Don Bernier chronicles Ray Bandar, a retired science teacher and lifelong skull collector who has transformed his home into a morbid museum of his life’s work. Bernier follows Ray from the dissection of fresh corpses on the beaches of San Francisco to the rafters of his basement lined with mammal skulls. In its sympathetic portrait of a lover of the natural world, Shelf Life reveals the importance of death in the life sciences. At this film, meet Bay Area resident Ray Bandar. Bandar appears alongside the documentary about him, bringing skulls and other mummified samples.

In The Ossuary by Jan Svenkmajer (1970, 10 min.), a black-and-white documentary shot in Czechoslovakia’s forbidding Sedlec Monastery, an ossuary contains the skeletal remains of some 40,000 victims of war and plagues from the 14th and 15th centuries. Amazingly, the mountains of bones were sorted and rearranged into grisly sculpture by a live-in artist at the end of the 19th Century.