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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ANNOUNCES FILM EXHIBITIONS FOR SEPTEMBER 2015
All films and events take place in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, unless otherwise noted.
Modern Matinées: Earliest Days
September 2–30
In September 2015 we introduce Modern Matinees, a new series of afternoon screenings, drawn from MoMA’s collection, organized around themes from big names and personalities to major movements, time periods, genres, and more. These anthology programs may change on a monthly basis or emerge in longer arcs, and they will often be accompanied by posts on MoMA’s Inside/Out blog. The Department of Film—originally called the Film Library—was founded in July 1935. The incorporation documents were signed by Trustees John Hay Whitney, A. Conger Goodyear and Nelson A. Rockefeller, establishing a collection that, in “An Outline of a Project for Founding the Film Library of The Museum of Modern Art,” library director John Abbott and curator Iris Barry vowed would be “inclusive, yet selective.”
This inaugural edition of Modern Matinees celebrates the Department of Film’s 80th anniversary with a selection of films that broadly illustrate the scope of donations the motion picture industry made to MoMA following Iris Barry’s momentous 1935 visit to Hollywood.
Full description and screening schedule
Hasse Ekman: The Other Swede in the Room
September 9–19
A director, writer, and actor of major gifts, Hasse Ekman would today be rightly remembered as one of Sweden’s greatest filmmakers were it not for the overshadowing presence in his life of Ingmar Bergman, Ekman’s contemporary, occasional collaborator, and constant competitor. The son of the legendary Swedish star Gösta Ekman (with whom he appears, opposite Ingrid Bergman, in Gustaf Molander’s 1936 Intermezzo), Hasse Ekman apprenticed with Ingmar Bergman at Lorens Marmstedt’s production company, Terrafilm, ably attacking a range of genres from war films to screwball comedies. After portraying a bitterly cynical director in Bergman’s 1949 Prison, Ekman offered an answer film of sorts in The Girl from the Third Row, countering Bergman’s hellish vision with a message of hope and humor. Yet Ekman was no cockeyed optimist: his best known film, the 1950 Girl with Hyacinths, is a strikingly modern psychological drama that Bergman himself recognized as “an absolute masterpiece.”
On this, the 100th anniversary of Ekman’s birth (September 10, 1915), MoMA presents a series aimed at bolstering this neglected master’s reputation in America. Programmed with the Swedish film scholar Fredrik Gustafsson, the series offers 10 films from Ekman’s long and diverse career, many of them being presented for the first time in the U.S. with English subtitles. All films are from Sweden, in Swedish with English subtitles, and written and directed by Hasse Ekman, unless otherwise noted.
Full description and screening schedule
MoMA Presents: Britni West’s Tired Moonlight
September 17–23
Britni West’s directorial debut, which won the Jury Award for Narrative Feature at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, discovers homespun poetry among the good folk of the filmmaker’s native Kalispell, Montana. Kalispell is a small town populated by lonely hearts engaging in awkward one-night stands, children with starry eyes and bruised knees, stock-car drivers, junkyard treasure hunters, and bighorn sheep. Rarely has Big Sky Country cast such a sweetly comic and tender spell. Photographed in Super-16mm by Adam Ginsberg and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast (with the exception of indie favorite Alex Karpovsky) in semi-fictionalized roles, Tired Moonlight is a sui generis slice of contemporary naturalism. (Text adapted from New Directors/New Films 2015 program notes.)
Full description and screening schedule
Films from Here: Recent Views from the Arab World
September 24–29
Films from Here provides a snapshot of contemporary filmmaking from the Middle East and North Africa through the lens of The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), an independent grant-making organization founded in 2007. While international coproductions are increasingly the norm in the industry, AFAC also posits itself as a champion of daring and impactful artistic expression in a time when limited production frameworks are exacerbated by turmoil throughout the Arab world.
The six features and two short films in this series, which were made between 2013 and 2015, emphasize a rich blend of narrative, documentary, and experimental traditions and act as a counterpoint to mass media images from the region. While these works often respond to the political and social conditions of their native countries—Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Palestine—they approach their subjects through archival research, found footage, reenactment, satire, genre, and auteurist storytelling.
Most screenings are New York premieres, and most will feature conversations with filmmakers between September 24 and 26. All films are in Arabic with English subtitles, unless otherwise noted. See moma.org/film for full details and screening schedule.
Full description and screening schedule
Gaumont Presents: Max Ophuls’s Sans lendemain
September 28
Each fall at MoMA, Gaumont presents a title from its archives in France. This year, Gaumont President Nicolas Seydoux and CEO Sidonie Dumas introduce Max Ophuls’s rarely seen Sans lendemain (1940), the last film he made in Europe before the eruption of World War II and, indeed, the last film he would make until The Exile, in Hollywood, in 1947.
For Jean Cocteau, who directed her in L’Aigle à deux têtes, Edwige Feullère incarnated “the queen of snow, blood, voluptousness and death.” In Sans lendemain’s classic melodrama, Feullère is a “fallen woman”—once respectable but now forced to dance nude in a Montmartre bar to support her young son—who rents an expensive furnished apartment to convince a long-ago lover (Georges Rigaud) that her life has been a happy one. More perhaps than any prewar Ophuls film, Sans lendemain anticipates his 1955 masterpiece Lola Montès; both films feature a heroine who exposes her body while concealing her soul, trapped in a glamourous environment that is revealed as little more than a cage.
Full description and screening schedule
What Lies Beneath: The Films of Robert Zemeckis
September 29–October 18
That Robert Zemeckis has created some of the most popular films of the last 40 years is beyond dispute: Used Cars (1980), Romancing the Stone (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Cast Away (2000) count among the classics of American cinema, as certified by box office returns, critics’ awards, and a pair of Oscars (Best Picture and Best Director) for Forrest Gump (1994). But Zemeckis is also a profoundly personal filmmaker, one of the last of that glorious breed of American studio directors who were instinctively able to combine popular appeal and individual expression, with no sense of compromise or condescension.
Full description and screening schedule
Ongoing Exhibitions:
Scorsese Screens
August 5–September 6
Held in conjunction with the Titus gallery exhibition Scorsese Collects
Full description and screening schedule
Ingrid Bergman: A Centennial Celebration
August 29–September 10
Full description and screening schedule
Special Screenings:
World Premiere of MoMA-Restored The Trial of Vivienne Ware
September 4
The 72nd Annual Venice Film Festival
The world premiere of the MoMA-restored film The Trial of Vivienne Ware (1932) will be held in the Venice Classics section at the 72nd Annual Venice Film Festival. Using an original nitrate print that came to the Museum in the 1970s, MoMA made a new safety preservation negative, digitally cleaned up the film to remove dirt, scratches, and splices, and rerecorded the soundtrack for greater fidelity. The film, directed by William K. Howard, will also be screened at MoMA in November, as a part of To Save and Project: The Annual MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. |
