FILM SCREENINGS

The Movie Orgy

1968. USA. Edited and directed by Joe Dante. Produced by Jon Davison. Who better to kick off MoMA’s annual preservation festival than Dante, creator of some of the best genre-bending movies of the past 40 years, including Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, Matinee, Masters of Horror (“The Screwfly Solution” and “Homecoming”), and “It’s a Good Life” from Twilight Zone: The Movie (presented on October 15). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dante and Jon Davison traveled across America screening The Movie Orgy at boozy colleges and grindhouse theaters. Today, the film can be regarded as one of the great artifacts of pop culture, a jaw-dropping extravaganza of Saturday matinee B-movie trailers, commercials, Army training films, sex hygiene films, newscasts, music clips, and Christian kiddie programs that have been stitched together into a demented but sharply political narrative. This rare screening will surely be a revelation to those only familiar with the montage films of Bruce Conner and Christian Marclay’s more recent sensation, The Clock. Dante presents a digital preservation of his unique celluloid print, which, ravaged by countless splices and projections, now resembles something out of The Giant Gila Monster. 270 min.