Halloween Night Films October 31, 2008

Shelf Life (2007, 29 min.)
by Don Bernier
Meet Ray Bandar, a retired science teacher and lifelong bone collector who transformed his home into a skeletal museum. Filmmaker Don Bernier follows Ray from the dissection of animal corpses on San Francisco beaches to the skull-lined rafters of his basement. In its sympathetic portrait of a lover of the natural world, Shelf Life reveals an appreciation of the role of death in the life sciences.

The Ossuary (1970, 10 min.)
by Jan Svenkmajer
This black-and-white documentary was shot in Czechoslovakia's forbidding Sedlec Monastery Ossuary, which contains the skeletal remains of some 40,000 war and plague victims from centuries past. These mountains of bones were sorted and rearranged into spectacularly grisly sculpture by a live-in artist at the end of the 19th century.

Official Website: http://www.exploratorium.edu