CATEGORY: PAST FILM EXHIBITIONS

One learns, I think, a fair amount about a national culture through its cinema, particularly if the culture is as homogenous as is Korea’s, with its rituals, social practices, communal aspirations, tortured history, and earthy cuisine. What is quite special to me is, unlike many other cinemas, that Korean films are made first and foremost for Koreans, because, after all, it is they and not anybody else who speak the language in which the films are made, and, unlike films manufactured by and for the Hollywood studios, they are not made with the export market foremost in mind. Read more

Trying to figure out which of Roman Polanski’s films are or are not “horror films” is a maddening and, in the end, fruitless exercise. Read more

I just returned from a Maine cabin by a large freshwater lake, where I was frightened of the water. Sharks might maul me, or if not sharks, then perhaps a large snapping turtle out of a Roger Corman film (not that I can recall a Corman film with a killer turtle). Read more

MoMA has described me as a Culinary Cineaste and given me Carte Blanche to select some of my favorite food films. My sincere thanks to MoMA and to Rajendra Roy for inviting me. What a pleasure and honor, because food is vital, and not just to me. Read more

In 2008 the Department of Film “celebrated” summer with a short series of films from MoMA’s collection set during the season in which everyone relaxes in the sun, and most people end up being caught off-guard. Read more

Sally Berger interviews documentary filmmaker Les Blank on the occasion of his MoMA film retrospective Les Blank: Ultimate Insider Read more

Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker (2008) (and the subject of MoMA’s current exhibition Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow), boasts an accomplished oeuvre of engrossing and exhilarating films that are unified in their defiance of genre expectations, their sensual and visceral imagery, and their examination of societal mores and individual psyches. Every distinguished filmmaker starts somewhere, and before Bigelow made her first feature film, she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and film scholarship and criticism at Columbia University. Read more

French-Caribbean filmmaker Euzhan Palcy (b. Martinique, 1958) creates politically engaged work exploring themes of race, gender, and social justice from a decidedly feminist perspective. She has written, produced, and directed over 15 fiction features and documentaries since 1983, when her first film, Rue Cases-Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley) won a Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. The director came to The Museum of Modern Art for the opening of her first U.S. career retrospective, Filmmaker in Focus: Euzhan Palcy, (in the MoMA theaters through May 30) and spoke with us about her earliest recollections of filmgoing; her experience as a black woman in the film business; her breakthrough debut; and such signature films as A Dry White Season Read more

Renowned Irish actor Gabriel Byrne joined us to discuss Revisiting The Quiet Man: Ireland on Film, an exhibition he curated with the Irish Film Institute and MoMA. Using John Ford’s iconic 1952 film The Quiet Man as a point of departure, the exhibition examines cinematic depictions of the Irish—in both American and Irish films—from 1910 to the present day. Read more

 

All of us have had the experience of being green (in the “inexperienced” sense, not the “Kermit” sense); that nervousness, insecurity, and exhilaration that propels us through uncharted territory. There are moments like this that are universal: first day of school, new job, first date. For artists, the moment when they present themselves for the first time to critics and discerning audiences can be extremely unsettling. Over the past 40 years the organizers of New Directors/New Films at MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have embraced the challenge of creating moments of nervous exhilaration for artists and audiences at every screening. Read more