Music, theater and dance are staples at UC Davis' Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and this month the 6-year-old center plans to add movies to the mix.

Focus on Film, open to the public, is a partnership of the Mondavi Center and the university's Film Studies program. Organizers said a new series each quarter will look at an important actor, director, theme or era in film.

The program is set to begin this winter quarter with an Ingmar Bergman retrospective and continue in the spring quarter with a series of perspectives on war. Faculty experts are being lined up to give talks before each film.

"Film is one of the major art forms of our time, one in which many of the greatest artists of the last and current century have worked," said Don Roth, the Mondavi Center's executive director.

"Focus on Film adds this very important genre to our overall program of theater, music and dance."

The movie venue is the Mondavi Center's Studio Theatre, described by Roth as "a terrific place to experience film." He noted the theater's "state-of-the-art digital projector, donated by our wonderful friend Barbara K. Jackson," as well as a "great sound system."

Showtime for all the films is 7 p.m., and organizers said the faculty talks will start at 6:30 p.m.

"This winter, we're starting at the top, with three works by the great Ingmar Bergman. Since his death last summer, he has been universally hailed as the most groundbreaking and influential director of the 20th century," Roth states on the Mondavi Web site.

The Bergman series' first film, 1975's The Magic Flute, is set for presentation Feb. 25, with a prescreening talk by Professor Anna Maria Busse Berger, chair of the Department of Music.

For Magic Flute, Bergman filmed a stage presentation of the Mozart opera of the same name, using camera angles that often focus on audience members' reactions as well as shots backstage. Roth calls the film "one of the greatest takes on opera ever on film," according to the Web site.

Bergman shot the film at Drottningholm Castle Theater in Stockholm, Sweden. The opera company sang Mozart's work in Swedish; the Bergman film carries English subtitles.

A Focus on Film flier from the Mondavi Center describes Bergman's Magic Flute as "a love letter from Bergman to his three loves: theater, film and music."

Scheduled for March 10 is Bergman's "most famous, compelling (and often parodied) film, The Seventh Seal, with its famous chess game with death," Roth said.

The 1957 film centers on the mid-14th century plague that spread from central Asia to Europe, killing an estimated 75 million people.

"Bergman's breakthrough film resonates with universal relevance to our time," the Focus on Film flier states. "There's no other film quite like this — a perfect introduction to Bergman if you don't yet know his films."

Focus on Film's Bergman retrospective is set to conclude March 17 with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, which, like his Magic Flute, shows that the director was not always gloomy.

This romantic comedy of errors inspired the Stephen Sondheim play A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's reverential film A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, according to the Focus on Film flier.

The spring series, Perspectives on War in Cinema, comprises movies from three eras and three great directors: Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) and, just when you thought everything was in black and white, Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), described by Roth as "the only great war movie ever made exclusively from the 'enemy's' perspective."

FOCUS ON FILM

WINTER QUARTER: INGMAR BERGMAN RETROSPECTIVE

Feb. 25 -- The Magic Flute (1975)

March 10 -- The Seventh Seal (1957)

March 17 -- Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

SPRING QUARTER: PERSPECTIVES ON WAR IN CINEMA

April 28 -- Grand Illusion (1937)

May 12 -- Paths of Glory (1957)

May 19 -- Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

TIME AND PLACE: 6:30 p.m. faculty talk, 7 p.m. screening, Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

TICKETS: $10 adults, $5 students and children, available through the box office: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org.

The Curriculum Connections program offers $3 tickets to UC Davis students to see any film listed on a course syllabus; to purchase these tickets, contact Dave Webb, dgwebb@ucdavis.edu.

MORE INFORMATION: www.mondaviarts.org (click on "'07-'08 Events by Genre," then click on "Film")