The Museum of Modern Art has launched Modern Mondays, a thought-provoking weekly screening series that engages viewers in dialogue and debate with filmmakers. This dynamic new initiative brings contemporary, innovative film and moving-image works to the public each week.
Modern Mondays presents new—and newly rediscovered—film and media works with the director in attendance, stimulating discourse, dialogue, and interaction in a social setting. Modern Mondays is an interdepartmental program organized by MoMA’s Department of Film and Department of Media.
Michael Haneke, whose work was the subject of a recent two-week retrospective, presented his 1997 film Funny Games on October 15, and discussed his oeuvre after the screening. Ernie Gehr appears on October 29 in conjunction with two current exhibitions of his work: Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows and Ernie Gehr: Moving-Image Minimalist. Other upcoming Modern Mondays presentations feature Kevin Everson (October 22), a documentarian whose films focus on the working-class culture of Black Americans and people of African descent, animators Michael Sporn (November 12) and Joshua Mosley (November 26), and German director Birgit Moeller, who presents her debut feature Valerie (2007) on November 5.
The Museum has a long history of exploring experimentation through previous programs such as Cineprobe, Video Viewpoints, and MediaScope. Modern Mondays allows audiences to continue to engage with artists’ recent work and to rediscover landmark works. Selected programs coincide with current film exhibitions, while others function as stand-alone presentations, but all explore diverse aspects of the moving image.
“The Modern Mondays series provides a new opportunity for New York audiences to experience cutting-edge moving image work and the artists who create them, building upon MoMA’s tradition of innovative film and video presentation,” says Rajendra Roy, Celeste Bartos Chief Curator, Department of Film. “Our goal is to propel filmmaking into the future by embracing its greatest risk-takers and celebrating the work of the pioneers of contemporary avant-garde cinema.”
Modern Mondays is supported by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Media sponsorship of Modern Mondays is provided by Artforum.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Monday, October 15, 7:00 - An Evening with Michael Haneke
On the occasion of a full retrospective of the feature films of Michael Haneke, one of contemporary cinema’s most provocative and incisive filmmakers, the director introduces the original Funny Games (1997), followed by a question-and-answer session. The evening is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Michael Haneke, the most comprehensive exhibition of the director’s work ever screened in North America, is presented October 3 through 15, 2007, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1. The series includes eight of Haneke’s celebrated theatrical features, several of which have won top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including The Piano Teacher (2001) and Caché (2005), both triple award-winners at Cannes, and the North American premieres of eight of Haneke’s Austrian-German television productions from the mid- 1970s to mid-1990s. The retrospective precedes Warner Independent Pictures’ October 26 release of the director’s 2007 remake of Funny Games.
Monday, October 22, 7:00 - An Evening with Kevin Everson
Kevin Jerome Everson (Charlottesville, Virginia) has been making films over the past decade about the working class culture of black Americans and people of African descent. He has completed a prodigious number of works, including two features and over 40 short 16mm, 35mm, and digital films. Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Everson frequently records family, friends, and life in the Midwest, but has developed art projects in Rome and elsewhere. His films look for the art in everyday life, reveal people’s relationship to their crafts, and focus on the conditions, tasks, gestures and materials in communities. Everson captures the relentlessness of everyday life as well as its beauty, with a naturalistic, almost documentary-like texture. Much of Everson’s current (from 2005 on) body of short works is inspired by found footage. He manipulates news and sports footage, old films, still photographs, and image files in various ways, subtly repositioning or restaging actions and movements to highlight or shift the original emphasis. This Modern Mondays presentation includes Emergency Needs (2007), based on a press conference with Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes; Something Else (2007), an interview with Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia, 1971, who expresses her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia contest; and premieres of several shorts. The evening is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Monday, October 29, 7:00 - An Evening with Ernie Gehr
Concurrent with his gallery installation, Gehr discusses Serene Velocity (1970) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991), relating them to his interest in pre-cinema objects and the artists who invented a “cinema of attractions” as evidenced in Gehr’s works in a pair of exhibitions: the gallery installation Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows, and the theatrical series Ernie Gehr: Moving Image Minimalist (both through February 25, 2008). The evening is organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, and Ronald Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. Serene Velocity. 1970. USA.
Carefully timed edits work with human persistence of vision as two perfectly framed shots of an office hallway metamorphose into a profound and otherworldly meditation on lines and squares. Preserved by MoMA in 35mm with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Silent. 23 min. Side/Walk/Shuttle. 1991. USA.
The city of San Francisco, shot from within a glass elevator, seems to perform gravity defying acts through simple visual manipulation. Two structuralist masterpieces separated by twenty years exhibit the artist’s abiding fascination with panorama and urban landscapes. 41 min.
Monday, November 5, 7:00 - An Evening with Birgit Moeller
First-time feature director Moeller, whose Valerie (2006) is part of the Museum’s annual contemporary German series Kino! 2007 (November 1-14) discusses her work. The evening is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. Valerie. 2006. Directed by Birgit Moeller. Screenplay by Moeller, Ruth Rehmet, Ilja Haller, Milena Balsch, Elke Sudmann. With Agata Buzek, David Striesow. Moeller’s debut feature concerns a young fashion model living in one of Berlin’s luxury hotels who suddenly finds herself in an unsettling situation. An assured, riveting, and ultimately positive film about a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, Valerie sees beyond the glamour of international catwalks and into the terror of being a private person in a public arena. 85 min.
Monday, November 12, 7:00 - An Evening with Michael Sporn
A conversation with animator Sporn, animation historian/filmmaker John Canemaker, and Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and organizer of this evening, as part of Michael Sporn (November 9–12), an exhibition of his work to date. Michael Sporn has been a vital creative force in animation for 35 years. Prior to opening his independent New York studio in 1980, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award–winning producer/director worked closely with legendary animation artists Faith and John Hubley, Richard Williams, and R.O. Blechman on commercials, shorts, and feature-length films, including Raggedy Ann & Andy and Everybody Rides the Carousel. Sporn has produced a diverse range of animation, including feature film titles (Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City), television specials (HBO’s Lyle, Lyle Crocodile), and even visuals for the Broadway stage (the 1981 musical Woman of the Year). A sensitive interpreter of children’s stories for the screen, Sporn has carefully adapted to animation the unique styles of storybook illustrators like William Steig, Russell Hoban, Bernard Waber, and Mordicai Gerstein. Sporn’s own production design—with its varied animation techniques and palette brilliantly choreographed to the music of composers like Caleb Sampson, William Finn, and Charles Strouse, and the distinctive voices of James Earl Jones, Susan Sarandon, and other actors—distinguishes his adaptations of such classic tales as The Red Shoes and The Hunting of the Snark, as well as socially conscious films like Champagne. “Michael Sporn is a poet of animation,” says John Canemaker. “His artistry and craftsmanship are first-rate, and he invests each of his handmade projects with keen intelligence, integrity, and heart.”
Monday, November 19, 7:00 - Best Film Not Playing at a Cinema Near You
Film and filmmaker to be announced on October 22: check www.moma.org after this date. For the second year running, MoMA’s Department of Film, in collaboration with IFP and its quarterly publication Filmmaker, will screen nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award. This nominated film, selected by senior members of the Filmmaker magazine editorial staff and Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, will be announced on October 22. Selected films represent this year’s best American independent films on the festival circuit that have yet to be picked up for theatrical distribution. The award winner, selected by Filmmaker magazine, will be announced on November 27 at the 17th annual Gotham Film Awards.
Monday, November 26, 7:00 - An Evening with Joshua Mosley
Philadelphia artist Mosley uses stop-motion animation to explore communication and the ways in which technology complicates it. He presents recent work, including Dread (2007). Installed at the fifty-second Venice Biennial, the work is a morality play in which the worlds of thought, imagination, and the subconscious are conjured and easy conclusions are forestalled. An animated photographic forest is the background against which two characters—French philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal—hold a conversation on the relationship between God-given natural order, free will, and the human and animal conditions. The evening is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Monday, December 3, 7:00 - An Evening with Lida Abdul
Lida Abdul uses diverse media to explore such concepts as obliteration, erasure, and loss of roots. In Clapping with Stones (2005), men knock together stones that were produced by the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, making a sound that evokes both destruction and construction. Born in Kabul in 1973, Abdul was forced to flee Afghanistan, living in political asylum centers for five years before moving to the U.S. She now resides in both the U.S. and Afghanistan. The evening is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art.
Monday, December 10, 7:00 - An Evening with Mario Rizzi
Rizzi (Italian, b. 1962) is a moving-image artist who makes both single screen projections and multi-screen installations. Although his base is Turin, Rizzi frequently takes up residence outside Italy in communities undergoing change. Here he patiently observes and films individuals coping with the transformations with their societies. For the Ninth International Istanbul Biennial, Rizzi completed a revelatory document about an artisanal shoemaker’s shop having to adjust to the changing commerce in that teeming city. The relationship between the father, Murat, and son, Ismail, is sometimes explosive: although tied together by the strong bonds of family father and son differ on how to adjust to survive. (Presented with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute, New York). Murat and Ismail (Murat v Ismail). 2005. Turkey. A film by Mario Rizzi. In Turkish, English subtitles. Digital print courtesy the artist. 60 min.
Monday, December 17, 7:00 - An Evening with Barbara Caspar
Caspar (Austrian, b. 1979) who studied philosophy, psychology, art, and, with Michael Haneke, film, has chosen to make a feature-length multi-layered documentary on Kathy Acker, the writer, performance artist, and icon for sexual liberation, whose books and appearances influenced many in the openness of her expressiveness and the free way in which she lived her life. Acker who was born in Manhattan in 1947 died of cancer in Tijuana in late 1997 and this special preview is being presented around the tenth anniversary of her passing. Caspar’s moving-image “portrait” of Acker is the first such “biography” of the artist since her deatha rather remarkable fact given Acker’s fame, notoriety and importance. Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? 2007. Austria/Germany. Written and directed by Barbara Caspar. Produced by Annette Piscane, Markus Fischer and Caspar. With, among others, Carolee Schneeman, Barney Rossett, Alan Sondheim, Ira Silverberg. In English. Approx. 80 min.
Monday, January 14, 7:00 - An Evening with Jeffrey Jeturian
The director introduces of The Bet Collector (2006) at the end of its week-long run.
Monday, January 28, 7:00 - An Evening with Pascale Ferran
Ferran introduces her adaptation of Lady Chatterley (2006). Other screenings to be announced. -- www.moma.org
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