THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS The Craft: Claire Atherton at The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art announces a film series, The Craft: Claire Atherton, from October 8–23, 2026.

French film editor Claire Atherton traces her creative beginnings to an early interest in Chinese language and Taoist philosophy, and a gig working with Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos at the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in the early 1980s. The first sparked a lifelong questioning of how combining images can create new meanings, and the second occasioned her first meeting with Chantal Akerman in 1984. This series celebrates four decades of Atherton's editing career, featuring key works from her 30-year working relationship with Akerman and more recent collaborations with Eric Baudelaire, Wang Bing, Bani Khoshnoudi, and others.

Characterized by formal precision and an openness of spirit, Atherton approaches editing as an encounter, privileging trust and intuition over predefined concept. She is not looking for a film to describe reality, as is often expected of documentaries, or even for it to tell a story, as is often expected of fiction films. Deeply attentive to rhythms of image and sound, Atherton's almost sculptural way of composing through time and space has extended beyond the cinema, beginning with her 1995 collaboration with Akerman to adapt her landmark film D'Est into a multiscreen installation.

This wide-ranging series is a testament to Atherton's ingenuity and understated virtuosity, equally expressed in giving shape to vast image archives or guiding the steady montage that anchors durational work. Charting her contributions to contemporary Francophone and international cinema, the selection spotlights her lesser-known but no less vital collaborations with artists whose personal, adventurous, and hybrid cinematic forms are largely screening for the first time in New York.