FILM SCREENINGS

Gabriel

1976. USA. Directed by Agnes Martin. The Museum of Modern Art, in cooperation with The Pace Gallery, has undertaken a preservation of Agnes Martin’s only completed film, Gabriel, a historically unique work that both illuminates and complicates our understanding of the artist and her paintings. “My movie is about happiness, innocence, and beauty,” Martin observed, “It’s about this little boy who climbs a mountain and all the beautiful things he sees.” To those familiar with the luminous, tactile, exacting geometries of her paintings, Gabriel’s elusive style and structure may come as a surprise: the lack of logical continuity; the point of view that shifts between that of the boy and an unseen observer; the handheld camera that is rarely at rest, but instead feels its way across the landscape, meandering and contemplating. Whatever tension exists in Gabriel comes from transition, variation, and difference: between shore and land, snow and desert, silence and Bach, solidity and movement, abstraction and nature. 78 min.