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THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN and More Among MoMA Film's April 2015 Lineup
By: BWW News Desk Mar. 17, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art has announced its film exhibitions for April 2015. All films and events take place in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, unless otherwise noted. Details below!
MoMA Presents: Josef von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman
March 30-April 5
In this seventh-and final- collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, the pair reveal much about their tortured romantic relationship, amid an outrageously sumptuous Spanish setting. This is one of the most beautiful and personal films ever to come out of a Hollywood studio. Marlene Dietrich's 35mm nitrate print is the source of MoMA's own preservation material.
April 1-14
The Museum of Modern Art's film collection now comprises nearly 30,000 film titles. The 20 recent acquisitions featured in this series illustrate MoMA's ongoing commitment to celebrating the worldwide diversity of cinema. These films-all acquired in the past three years and produced since 2000-are drawn from a diverse range of past film exhibitions, including Global Lens, Premiere Brazil!, and Lourdes Portillo: La Cineasta Inquisitiva, that resulted in key contemporary acquisitions to the collection.
April 1-May 29
Born in South Pasadena, California, in 1905, Joel McCrea grew up in the film industry, rising through the ranks of extras and assistants to land his first studio contract in 1928. Completely at home in front of the camera, McCrea projected a relaxed, lightly self-mocking quality that served him across a wide range of genres, from drawing-room comedies to Westerns. Slow to anger, reluctant to express hurt or desire, McCrea's seemingly imperturbable characters anticipate the kind of ironic detachment that would not become a Hollywood norm until the 1960s-one reason why his work still seems fresh and natural to contemporary audiences. This series, drawn from 35mm prints in MoMA's collection, presents an overview of McCrea's early career, from 1932 to 1943.Full description and screening scheduleModern Mondays: An Evening with Glen Keane and John Canemaker
Monday, April 6
4:00 p.m. Screening of Beauty and the Beast (1991)
7:00 p.m. Discussion with Glen Keane and John Canemaker
This special Modern Mondays features the New York theatrical premiere of Glen Keane's most recent project, the soaring, gossamer Duet (2014). An independent collaboration with Google's Advance Technology and Projects Group (ATAP), Duet is an interactive hand-drawn animation that explores spatial and sensory awareness. Keane, who retired from Disney in 2013 after a nearly four-decade career as a master of character animation, will take part in an onstage conversation with the Academy Award-winning animation filmmaker and historian John Canemaker. Richly illustrated with film clips and other imagery, the conversation will trace Keane's career, from his mid-1970s Disney apprenticeship to his groundbreaking experiments in situating hand-drawn characters in computer-generated environments.
April 9-17
At the age of 27, Nelson Pereira dos Santos revolutionized the Brazilian cinema with his 1955 debut feature, Rio, 40 graus (Rio, 100 Degrees), a portrait of Rio de Janeiro that set a neorealist aesthetic to a loose and looping samba beat. Almost 60 years later, Pereira remains a vital creative force, still passionately engaged with the people, music, and politics of his country, as exemplified by his 2012 documentary A Música segundo Tom Jobim (The Music According to Antonio Carlos Jobim). In the interim, Pereira became, with Glauber Rocha and Ruy Guerra, one of the central figures in the Brazilian movement known as Cinema Novo, which combined the exuberant stylistics of the French New Wave with Brazilian popular culture and postcolonialist political thought. From the spare and agonizing Vidas secas (Barren Lives) of 1963 through the swirling sensuality and black humor of 1973's Como era gostoso o meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman), Pereira has explored a wide range of perspectives on his country's troubled past and turbulent present, while his warm humanism points to a bright future. He stands today as the doyen of Latin American directors, and MoMA is pleased to welcome him to New York for this condensed overview of his remarkable career. Full description and screening scheduleFamily Films: Picture This! Books on Film
Saturday, April 11, 12:00 p.m.
The Celeste Bartos Theater Frederick. 1987. USA. Directed by Giulio Gianini. Sky Color. 2012. USA. Directed by Gary Goldberger, John Lechner and Peter H. Reynolds. Norman the Doorman. 1971. USA. Directed by Don Freeman.Full descriptionModern Mondays: An Evening with Luther Price
Monday, April 13, 7:00 p.m.
Luther Price, whose work is featured in the exhibition Cut to Swipe, is one of the key figures of contemporary experimental cinema. First known for his haunting Super-8 movies, he has gained a considerable amount of attention in recent years for a suite of 16mm works in which he re-edits junked reels or transforms found strips of film by elaborately abrading the emulsion and obscuring the parent material in dense layers of paint and ink. For this evening's event, Price presents a selection of earlier work alongside new films that have not yet been screened in New York. The evening culminates with Price in conversation with Thomas Beard, one of the directors of Light Industry, and Lia Gangitano, the director of PARTICIPANT INC. Full descriptionModern Mondays: An Evening with Shezad Dawood
Monday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.
This Modern Mondays event includes the New York premiere of London-based artist Shezad Dawood's first feature film, Piercing Brightness (2013), which blends color-drenched, kaleidoscopic tableaux and archival footage of extraterrestrial sightings with a loose science-fiction narrative. Set in the Northern England town of Preston, which has the most reported UFO sightings in the U.K. and was an early site for the Mormon Church, the film's exploration of race, migration, and assimilation resonates as strongly as its dizzying, delightful images.Full descriptionBruce LaBruce
April 23-May 2
For over a quarter-century the auteur/provocateur known as Bruce LaBruce has been disrupting, dissecting, and disrobing in the name of cinema. Blasted into the demimonde of underground punk moviemaking with his feature debut, No Skin Off My Ass, LaBruce quickly established that, while he was certainkly game for exploring the messy, sticky zones of fringe film, he was actually the unholy product of arthouse auteurism. From Robert Altman to Federico Fellini and Werner Herzog, LaBruce mines the sacred texts of the canon and inserts his own revolutionary gay-sex-positive narratives. Layered with scathing wit and a fundamental rejection of capitalist control over the mind and body, his films take to task the mainstream porn industry as well as Hollywood. In this spirit, he has collaborated with actors-like Slava Mogutin, Tony Ward, and Francois Sagat-who swing between art and commerce, fashion and filth, the avant-garde and the boulevard. Bruce LaBruce's particular brand of regal queer fecundity has spawned a generation of feral filmmakers (and ravenous audiences) willing to go a step beyond where Jack Smith, John Waters, and Andy Warhol brought us. Full description and screening scheduleModern Mondays: An Evening with Bouchra Khalili
Monday, April 27, 7:00 p.m.
Berlin-based, Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili presents a screening program juxtaposing her own work with works by artists and filmmakers who have influenced her. Trained in cinema and visual art and working across mediums, Khalili often retools the aesthetic strategies of documentary cinema. Her work focuses on historical speculation and the representation of subjects rendered invisible by the nation-state. Khalili will be joined in discussion by Thomas J. Lax, associate curator in MoMA's Department of Media and Performance Art. This program is organized on the occasion of the Museum's recent acquisition of work by the artist.Full description
Pictured: A scene from The Devil Is a Woman. 1935. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg.
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