MoMA Honors Kathryn Bigelow With Mid-Career Retrospective 6/1-8/13

The Museum of Modern Art announces a complete retrospective of the works of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow (American, b. 1951). Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow, June 1 through August 13, 2011, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, offers the filmmaker's eight features. As a writer, director, and producer, Bigelow has received numerous honors, most notably Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Directing for her most recent war drama, The Hurt Locker (2008), a new MoMA acquisition. Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow will open on June 1 with The Loveless (1982) and the premiere of the 35mm preservation of Set-Up (1978), with Bigelow in attendance to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening Q&A. The exhibition is organized by Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Originally an art student, Bigelow entered the graduate film studies program at Columbia University, where she completed her short film, Set-Up, examining the psychology of violence through observation and commentary. Bigelow then directed her first full-length film, The Loveless, which tells the story of a motorcycle gang that causes trouble in a small southern town and features the debut of Willem Dafoe in his first starring role.

A measured filmmaker exceptional in subverting the confines of the genre film by crafting new amalgams, Bigelow's notable features include the vampire Western Near Dark (1987); Point Break (1991), a surfing movie combined with a heist thriller; Strange Days (1995) where film noir meets science fiction; and the contemporary melodrama fused with a period murder mystery, The Weight of Water (2000), all of which are featured in the retrospective. The series also includes Blue Steel (1989), about a rookie cop who is stalked by a man who becomes infatuated after witnessing her gun down an armed robber, and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), recounting the catastrophic true events onboard the titular Soviet nuclear submarine during her maiden voyage at the height of the Cold War in 1961.

Bigelow's immersive films utilize sensual and visceral imagery to confront societal mores and lay bare individual psyches. Her characters, often operating in an arena of adrenaline, straddle the line between superhero and heartbreakingly human. This theme follows Bigelow's work through her latest films K-19: The Widowmaker and The Hurt Locker, but the hyperrealism of her earlier films has given way to a groundedness that results from the inherent gravity of historical events and situations.

Complementing the film retrospective, a gallery exhibition (May 18-October 3) will examine Bigelow's filmmaking via paintings, concept art, film posters, drawings, storyboards, scripts, short films, and props. The exhibition will contain documents from her film projects from Set-Up to The Hurt Locker, from pre-production research through production notes to post-production publicity and press materials. Bigelow began her career as a painter and conceptual artist, segueing into film as simply another medium to explore her themes. After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, she participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and joined the conceptual art collective Art & Language before her artistic impulse led her to graduate film studies at Columbia University. Her background continues to reverberate throughout her films, manifested in her stylized visual treatment of film, her careful construction of the space within a frame, and her exploration of the content of her movies via paintings and drawings. This installation, comprising works from Bigelow's personal archive and including her early films and works on paper, reveals her intuitive process and demonstrates the singularity of her methods and motifs.
In addition, Lawrence Weiner & Kathryn Bigelow: Films and Videos, further sheds light on Bigelow's early works. This program of short films and videos features Bigelow's collaborations with Weiner in the early 1970s. She appeared in his moving-image works as well as contributed to their scripts and editing. The themes of their collaborations-the use of audio to dissect the visual, experimentation with the inherent properties of films and videos, and an engagement with the active viewer-are explored by Bigelow in her own film works, Psychological Operations in Support of Unconventional Warfare (1975) and Set-Up (1978).

Sponsorship:
This exhibition is made possible by BNP Paribas.