The Eighth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Set For 10/15-11/14

The Museum of Modern Art presents To Save and Project: The Eighth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, its annual festival of preserved and restored films from film archives, studios, and distributors around the world, from October 15 through November 14, 2010. This year's festival comprises over 35 films from 13 countries, virtually all of them having their New York premieres, and some shown in versions never before seen in the United States. To Save and Project is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator; Anne Morra, Associate Curator; and Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager; all of the Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

The festival's centerpiece is the world premiere performance of Gene Coleman and Akikazu Nakamura's original score for Teinosuke Kinugasa's silent masterpiece Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness) (1926), which will be performed live on Saturday, October 23, by the Ensemble N_JP (Japan/United States), led by award-winning composer and bass clarinetist Coleman and featuring the master shakuhachi player and composer Akikazu Nakamura. Long believed lost, Kinugasa's A Page of Madness is a classic of Japanese silent cinema. Co-written by Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Izu Dancer and Snow Country, it is truly unlike any other film ever made, using a breathtaking array of avant-garde, expressionist, and surrealist filmmaking techniques to evoke the madness of patients in a mental hospital-their nightmares and hallucinations, but also an inner life of serenity and beauty.

http://www.moma.org/