THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY, Festival of Film Preservation and More Set for MoMA, Oct 2013
By: BWW News Desk Sep. 07, 2013
The Museum of Modern Art has announced its film exhibitions for October 2013. Details below!
MoMA Presents: Javier Rebollo's The Dead Man and Being HappyOctober 1-7
In Award-winning Spanish director Javier Rebollo's third feature, Santos (renowned Spanish actor José Sacristán), a sick, worn-down hired killer, impulsively heads out on one last assignment: a 2,000-mile excursion from his Buenos Aires hospital bed into the vast interior of Argentina. Cruising along in a vintage Ford Falcon, he encounters Alejandra (Roxana Blanco), who tricks him into taking her along. Their journey takes them through countryside that feels as remote, empty, and forlorn as they are.Click here for full description and screening schedule.Edmund de Waal Presents Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
October 4
As a prelude to the 11th edition of To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, Edmund de Waal, author ofThe Hare with the Amber Eyes and a celebrated British ceramicist, introduces The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Vittorio De Sica's heartbreaking film adaptation of Giorgio Bassani's great historical novel.The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the 1972 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is a story about the Jewish community in the northern Italian town of Ferrara in the late 1930s, when Mussolini instituted an anti-Semitic code modeled on Germany's inhuman Nuremberg laws. It is also the story of a middle-class boy who briefly and painfully enters the cloistered world of the Finzi-Continis, an aristocratic Jewish family whose wealth and learning will not save them from the Holocaust.
October 8-14
Since 2006, Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría has traveled to the cemetery of Puerto Berrio, on the banks of the Magdalena River in Colombia, to document, first in photographs and now in film, how local townspeople reclaim unidentified victims of the country's half-century-long drug wars. The locals give these anonymous victims new names, decorate and visit their graves, and honor their memory as one would a lost family member-all because, according to their faith, this care and attention to the unidentified corpses, called No Names (NNs), guarantees divine protection and special favors. The film documents these rituals, unique in all of Colombia, in which a community defies the culture of violence by keeping the memory of the disappeared alive.
October 10-November 12
To Save and Project, MoMA's international festival of film preservation, celebrates its 11th year with gloriously preserved masterworks and rediscoveries of world cinema. Virtually all of the films in the festival are having their New York premieres, and some are shown in versions never before seen in the United States, including Michelangelo Antonioni's I Vinti (1953). This year's edition opens with a carte blanche weekend with Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Descendants, Election, andSideways).Click here for full description; screening schedule forthcoming.MoMA Presents: Mikko Niskanen's Eight Deadly Shots and Peter Von Bagh's The Story of Mikko Niskanen
October 15-22
Long before The Wire, Breaking Bad, and The Killing, there was Mikko Niskanen's Eight Deadly Shots, an extraordinary Finnish television miniseries that recounted in flashback and unflinching detail the desperate circumstances that led an impoverished tenant farmer to shoot four policemen in a drunken rage. This forgotten gem, from 1972, makes its New York debut in its original five-hour-plus version, presented as part of To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. Peter Von Bagh's own documentary portrait of Mikko Niskanen is an indispensable companion piece to these screenings, providing the context in which Eight Deadly Shots was made. Click here for full description and screening schedule.Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen
Ongoing
Presented in conjunction with MoMA's Dante Ferretti gallery exhibition, this 22-film retrospective demonstrates how the designer's settings have served to guide directorial practice with signature distinction.Constructing "a working space for narrative" is how production designer Ferretti describes his role in the collaborative process of filmmaking and in his practice of conceiving, for each project, a single set piece intended to stimulate the director's imagination and crystallize the visual style and character of the film. Indulging his preference for both dreamlike and historical subjects, and drawing on his knowledge of painting, sculpture, and poetry, Ferretti categorizes his designs as "period" (Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom), "fantasy" (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), or "contemporary" (Todo Modo).Click here for full description and screening schedule. An Auteurist History of Film
Throughout October
Drawing on auteur theory-which contends that, despite the collaborative nature of the medium, the director is the primary force behind the creation of a film-this ongoing screening cycle is intended to serve as both an exploration of the richness of the Museum's film collection and a basic introduction to the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the 20th century.Click here for full description and screening schedule.Modern Mondays
An Evening with Christine Sun Kim: Monday, October 7
An Evening with Boris Charmatz, Simone Forti, and Ralph Lemon:Monday, October 21
Bruce Conner's Crossroads: A Premiere Screening and Conversation:Monday, October 28Click here for full description.Pictured: Tiger Morse (Reel 14 of ****). 1967. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. 16mm, color, sound; 33 min. @ 24 fps. With Joan "Tiger" Morse. ©2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.
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