Proof of vaccination is required for on-site film screenings. Learn more about visiting us safely.
MoMA is honored to present a screening series selected by renowned curator and film programmer Mark McElhatten. “I like to present programs that are more than the sum of their parts,” he says, “an experience that can’t be summarized made up of films that can’t be told.” A founding curator of the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, and Martin Scorsese’s film archivist for 22 years, McElhatten has been curating film and video programs at major museums and festivals around the world since 1976.
“Cinema exists before and after film as a modality of human consciousness,” says McElhatten. “I’ve always resisted informational or thematic programs as I work with intuition and with each film to compose an experience. The films presented in this series touch on many ideas and issues: the human subconscious, the daily, the sublime, race, colonialism, mortality, desire, difference, and division. They are songs of experience holding surprises, revealing their essence and versatility in context, not limited to carrying a particular weight of explanation. Unexplained but not inexplicable. Films that honor the viewer by acknowledging your freedom and intelligence.”
Highlights of the series will include world premieres of work by Nathaniel Dorsky, David Gatten and Ashley West, Ernie Gehr, Vincent Grenier, Eve Heller, Ken and Nisi Jacobs, Dani (Leventhal) ReStack and Sheliah (Wilson) ReStack, and Leslie Thornton; US premieres from Michael Robinson; rare screenings of films by Joseph Cornell and Jacques Rivette; and films by Bruce Conner, Claire Denis, Mark LaPore, Buster Keaton, Gregory Markopoulos, Talena Sanders, Phil Solomon, John Reinhardt, and more.
Organized by Mark McElhatten, guest curator; with Ron Magliozzi, Curator, Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, and Olivia Priedite, Senior Program Assistant, Department of Film.
