To Save and Project: The Eighth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
October 15–November 14, 2010
The festival's centerpiece is the world premiere performance of Gene Coleman and Akikazu Nakamura's original score for Teinosuke Kinugasa's silent masterpiece Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness) (1926), which will be performed live on Saturday, October 23, by the Ensemble N_JP (Japan/United States), led by award-winning composer and bass clarinetist Coleman and featuring the master shakuhachi player and composer Nakamura. Long believed lost, A Page of Madness is a classic of Japanese silent cinema, cowritten by Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Izu Dancer and Snow Country. It is truly unlike any other film ever made, using a breathtaking array of avant-garde, expressionist, and surrealist filmmaking techniques to evoke the madness of patients in a mental hospital—their nightmares and hallucinations, but also an inner life of serenity and beauty.
The festival is supported in part by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York. Electronic subtitling provided by Sub-Ti Ltd.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
Past
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)
1963. Italy. Luchino Visconti. 201 min.
Sunnyside Up
1929. USA. David Butler. 120 min.
Rachel Harrison presents Carlos Velo’s Almadrabas and Torero
In conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, the artist Rachel Harrison introduces two beautiful films by the underappreciated Spanish director Carlos Velo: Almadrabas (co-directed by Fernando G. Mantilla, 1934, 21 min.), his proto-Neorealist short about tuna fisherman; and his Academy Award–nominated feature Torero (1956, 75 min.), widely considered the most authentic and gripping film ever made about bullfighting, which features the legendary matador Luis Procuna in a somewhat fictionalized account of his comeback from injury, and newsreel footage of the great Manolete’s death by goring. Restored by the Filmoteca Española, Madrid. In Spanish; English subtitles.
The Story of Temple Drake
1933. USA. Stephen Roberts. 70 min.
Acto da Primavera (Rite of Spring)
1963. Portugal. Manoel de Oliviera. 99 min.
La Chair de l’orchidée (The Flesh of the Orchid)
1975. France/Germany/Italy. Patrice Chéreau. 110 min.
Cavalcade
1933. USA. Frank Lloyd. 110 min.
Kandahar (The Ruins)
1983. India. Mrinal Sen. 106 min.
J’Accuse
1919. France. Abel Gance. Approx. 161 min.
The Orphan Film Project x 7
The biannual Orphan Film Symposium is an international gathering of preservationists, historians, curators, and artists who work with neglected cinema artifacts. A forum for advocates of underappreciated but significant films, the symposium now coordinates new preservation through its year-round Orphan Film Project at New York University. For this MoMA program, Dan Streible, the founder and director of Orphans, has chosen seven short films to represent each of the seven Orphan Film Symposia that have taken place thus far. The selection, which he will introduce, features two rediscoveries, both from NYU’s Tamiment Library: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first film, With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938), narrated by curator-historian Juan Salas; and The Passaic Textile Strike (1926). Other found treasures include A Trip Down Market Street (1906), from the famed Prelinger Archives; two 1928 outtakes from the Fox Movietone News collection at the University of South Carolina, in which Will Hays, Tom Mix, John Ford, and Frank Borzage meet “Leon Trotsky”; and Helen Hill’s animated short Scratch and Crow (1995), which was recently named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Paul Sharits: Restored Films
An artist-filmmaker who created an extensive body of work in numerous mediums, Sharits (1943–1993) was primarily engaged with color and the use of celluloid film as a material object. In addition to making numerous short films intended for theatrical viewing, Sharits was one of the earliest filmmakers to produce works for gallery installation, a form he referred to as “locationals.” Anthology Film Archives has been engaged in a long-term effort to conserve and restore Sharits’ innovative, explosive works for single-screen and multi-projector exhibition. This dynamic program, presented on Anthology’s Fortieth Anniversary and drawn from its collection, will focus on recently preserved films as well as some lesser-known titles from Sharits’ extensive oeuvre, including his earliest surviving work, Wintercourse (1962). The films will be introduced by Andrew Lampert, Archivist, Anthology Film Archives, and Jay Sanders, a curator, writer, and gallery director of Greene Naftali.
Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness: A World Premiere Concert
Long believed lost, Kinugasa’s Kurutta Ippeiji (A Page of Madness) (1926) is a masterpiece of Japanese silent cinema and truly unlike any other film ever made, using a breathtaking array of avant-garde, expressionist, and surrealist filmmaking techniques to evoke the madness of patients in a mental hospital—their nightmares and hallucinations, but also an inner life of serenity and beauty. The centerpiece of this year’s festival is the world premiere of an original score performed live by the Ensemble N_JP (Japan/United States), under the direction of the award-winning composer and bass clarinetist Gene Coleman and featuring the master shakuhachi player and composer Akikazu Nakamura; the koto player Toshiko Kuto; the cellist Alex Waterman; the contra bassist Evan Lipson; and the conductor Rei Hotoda, an assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony. Commissioned by the International House Philadelphia, where it will be presented the night before the MoMA performance, and supported by the Japan Foundation, the score also features benshi-style narration (spoken text in Japanese and English). The film’s scenario was co-written by Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Izu Dancer and Snow Country. On October 24, Nakamura will present a Missoku (secret breathing) workshop and Shakuhachi master class at Japan Society.
Andy Warhol’s Face and The Velvet Underground in Boston: Two Premieres in Memory of Callie Angell
Callie Angell was adjunct curator of The Andy Warhol Film Project at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the author of Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Remembering and honoring her as the world’s leading scholar of Andy Warhol films, and an early and dedicated champion of their preservation, MoMA presents the New York premiere of two newly restored films that haven’t been shown in more than forty years. Featuring two fixed-frame shots of Warhol’s socialite superstar Edie Sedgwick, Face (1965, USA, 66 min.) captures what the singer and poet Patti Smith described as Sedgwick’s ability to radiate “intelligence, speed, and being connected with the moment.” The Velvet Underground in Boston (1967, USA, 33 min.), which Warhol shot during a concert at the Boston Tea Party, features a variety of filmmaking techniques—sudden in-and-out zooms, sweeping panning shots, in-camera edits that create single frame images and bursts of light like paparazzi flash bulbs going off—that mirror the kinesthetic experience of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with its strobe lights, whip dancers, colorful slide shows, multi-screen projections, liberal use of amphetamines, and overpowering sound of The Velvet Underground. Preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
La 317ème Section (The 317th Section)
1965. France/Spain. Pierre Schoendoerffer. 100 min.
Wanda
1970. USA. Barbara Loden. 102 min.
Der weisse Teufel (The White Devil)
1930. Germany. Alexandre Volkoff. 105 min.
Cry Danger
1951. USA. Robert Parrish. 79 min.
Point of Order!
1963. USA. Emile de Antonio. 97 min.
Sunday
1961. USA. Dan Drasin. 17 min.
Tom Chomont: In Celebration
The filmmaker Jim Hubbard, together with Ross Lipman, Senior Film Preservationist, UCLA Film & Television Archive, will present this special tribute to the late Tom Chomont. Hubbard writes: “Between 1962 and 1989, Tom Chomont made over 40 films. The subtitle of his film Phases of the Moon best characterizes all of his work: The Parapsychology of Everyday Life. Chomont’s films offer a lyric depiction of the ordinary world, but at the same time reveal an unabashedly spiritual and sexualized parallel universe. His incomparable technique of offsetting color positive and high contrast black-and-white negative creates a subtly beautiful, otherworldly aura. This program features the gorgeously restored Love Objects (1971), which seems shockingly up-to-date in its exploration of fluid gender and sexuality; Jabbok (1967), a gently erotic re-imagining of Jacob wrestling with the angel; and Oblivion (1969), a shimmering, complex portrait of a young man. Starting in 1990, despite increasingly severe Parkinson's disease, Tom made more than a dozen videos. They are hard-edged and raw. While many center on explicit S&M imagery, they go beyond the performative aspects of sadomasochistic practice and become an entrée to a transcendent and philosophical spirit world. Tom Chomont died on June 28, 2010.” Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive for The Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation and through the Avant-Garde Master Program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Mangue-Bangue
1971. Brazil. Neville d’Almeida. 62 min.
The Day of the Triffids
1963. USA. Steve Sekely, Freddie Francis (uncredited). 96 min.
Serge Bromberg Presents Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams and Ub Iwerks Cartoons
Serge Bromberg, director of the internationally celebrated Annecy Animation Film Festival in France, presents a wonderful selection of Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams from 1921–23, which have been recently preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, as well as five cartoons by the legendary animator Ub Iwerks, preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive. In 1915, Disney founded the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri, inviting some of animation’s future greats, including Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Friz Freleng, and Rudolph Ising, to create fairy tale cartoons. This program features six of these tales: Little Red Riding Hood (aka Grandma Steps Out), Jack the Giant Killer (aka The KO Kid), Puss in Boots (aka The Cat’s Whiskers), Goldie Locks and the Three Bears (aka The Peroxide Kid), The Four Musicians of Bremen, and Newman Laugh-O-Grams. Iwerks, a Kansas City native, followed Disney to Hollywood, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Alice Comedies and the transformation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit into Mickey Mouse. Iwerks eventually left Walt Disney Studios, had an independent studio of his own for several years in the 1930s, worked for a time on Looney Tunes shorts, and then returned to Disney in 1940 to develop special visual effects, for which he won two Academy Awards. Bromberg presents five cartoons from the independent Iwerks Studio: Techno-Cracked (1933), The Brave Tin Solder (1934), Jack Frost (1934), Don Quixote (1934), and his undisputed masterpiece, Balloon Land (1935). The Disney Laugh-O-Grams are silent. Ub Iwerks films are courtesy of David Shepard.
Langsammer Sommer (Slow Summer)
1976. Austria. John Cook, in collaboration with Susanne Schett. 83 min.
Playing in the Dark: Glenn Ligon Presents Thomas Edison Films
In conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition “Contemporary Art from the Collection,” the artist Glenn Ligon has curated this special selection of films by Thomas Edison and other pioneering filmmakers, exploring the various ways that race and ethnicity are represented in early American cinema. “In works such as Watermelon Eating Contest (1896), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1901) and A Change of Complexion (1914),” he notes, “one can observe how the language of this new technology is mobilized in the service of reinforcing prevailing notions of race and ethnicity, and see how in subtle and obvious ways the actors in the productions ‘break the frame.’” Ligon will also present an excerpt from his video installation The Death of Tom (2008), now on view in the Museum’s second floor galleries, which he based on the last scenes of Edison’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and created in collaboration with the pianist Jason Moran. Silent; with piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.
Volker Schlöndorff Presents the Digital Director’s Cut of The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum
1979/2010. West Germany/France. Volker Schlöndorff. 164 min.
Bad Girl
1931. USA. Frank Borzage. 90 min.
They Made Me a Fugitive
1947. Great Britain. Alberto Cavalcanti. 100 min.
Lynda Benglis presents Suddenly, Last Summer
Suddenly, Last Summer
1959. USA. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 114 min.
Women’s Film Preservation Fund, Program 1: “Pretty Women”
MoMA celebrates its ongoing relationship with New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) by presenting two programs preserved through its Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF). The WFPF was founded in 1995 by The Museum of Modern Art and NYWIFT in order to preserve the cultural legacy of women in the film industry. The only fund of its kind, the WFPF has provided financial support for the preservation of over 80 short and feature films.
Lipstick 74
ca. 1974. USA. Jane Morrison. 8 min.
Anything You Want to Be
1971. USA. Liane Brandon. 8 min.
Betty Tells Her Story
1972. USA. Liane Brandon. 20 min.
All Women Are Equal
1972. USA. Marguerite Paris. 15 min.
Desire Pie
1976. USA. Lisa Crafts. 5 min.
Women’s Film Preservation Fund, Program 2: “By Hand and Heart”
MoMA celebrates its ongoing relationship with New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) by presenting two programs preserved through its Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF). The WFPF was founded in 1995 by The Museum of Modern Art and NYWIFT in order to preserve the cultural legacy of women in the film industry. The only fund of its kind, the WFPF has provided financial support for the preservation of over 80 short and feature films.
Quilting Women
1976. USA. Elizabeth Barret. 28 min.
Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo
1985. Argentina. Lourdes Portillo, Susana Muñoz. 64 min.
Inferential Current. 1971. Directed by Paul Sharits