Virtual Cinema screenings are available exclusively to MoMA members. Not a member? Join today and start streaming.
A Willie Wonka for a new generation, Christmas Dreams is at once, in Michael Rapp’s music and concept, an homage to the television Christmas specials of the past and, in Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s direction, a sort of psychotronic expansion of them, full of imaginatively bizarre imagery and strange situations. Provocatively, McElhinney neither mocks the material nor fully embraces it, leaving the spectator in an unaccustomed position of rhetorical uncertainty, suspended between irony and sentiment.
A Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker and experimental theater director, McElhinney is best known for his 2000 gothic horror film A Chronicle of Corpses, an audacious blend of Vermeer lighting and genre plotting, praised by Dennis Lim in the Village Voice for its “rancid opulence and humid religiosity.” He is currently completing work on Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions, a history of the city from 1960 to 2010 as seen through five different neighborhoods, each shot in a different film format.
Organized by Dave Kehr, Curator, Department of Film.
