MoMA welcomes James Schamus, Columbia University professor and CEO of Focus Features, as he introduces a screening of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Gertrud. Before the screening, Schamus will sign copies of his book Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud: The Moving Word. “Schamus’s book focuses on a single moment in Gertrud. He follows a trail of references and allusions back through a number of thinkers and artists (Boccaccio, Lessing, Philostratus, Charcot, and others) to reveal the richness and depth of Dreyer’s work—and the excitement that can accompany cinema studies when it opens itself up to other disciplines and media. Throughout, Schamus pays particular attention to Dreyer’s lifelong obsession with the ’real,’ developed through his practice of ’textual realism,’ a realism grounded not in standard codes of verisimilitude but on the force of its rhetorical appeal to its written, documentary sources” (University of Washington Press).
Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film.