MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2007

Organized by the Department of Film and the Department of Media.

Modern Mondays is made possible by Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro. Additional support is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Media sponsorship is provided by Artforum.

Synthetic Times: Media Art Now
To complement the exhibition Synthetic Times—Media Art China 2008, a Cultural Olympics project opening at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in June 2008, media artists debate issues revolving around the exhibition's themes: Beyond Body; Emotive Digital; The Recombinant Reality; and Here, There, and Everywhere. With NAMOC director Fan Dian; artists Miao Xiaochun and Xu Bing; exhibition producer Li Zhenghua; and curator Zhang Ga. This event kicks off a pre-exhibition symposium (April 15) held at Parsons, the New School for Design, and eyebeam, in collaboration with the National Art Museum of China. For details visit www.mediartchina.org.
Monday, April 14, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Kalup Linzy
Kalup Linzy (b. Stuckey, FL; lives Brooklyn, NY) is best known for the performance-based videos that he has written, directed, edited, and performed in professionally since 1990. Adopting the styles and narratives of American television soap operas, Hollywood tearjerkers and romance films, Spanish-language novellas, and Nigerian video melodramas, Linzy satirically deconstructs themes of sexuality and gender, race, class, and pop culture. The soundtracks are pre-recorded and lip-synched and the characters—sublimely cast with a range of engaging professional and nonprofessional performers—are frequently played in drag. Linzy himself plays the starring role and often performs the voice-overs for the other characters. His videos and performances are popularly received on YouTube and MySpace, on broadcast radio, and in galleries and museums worldwide.

The program includes highlights from Linzy's song-based videos, including Lollypop (2006), As da Artworld Might Turn (2006), and Melody Set Me Free (2007). Also included are two premieres: How Katessa Got Her Groove Back (2008), a satirical short based on the film How Stella Got Her Groove Back; and SweetBerry Sonnet (2008), a work in progress.
Monday, April 21, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Karen Yasinsky
Karen Yasinksy (b. Pittsburgh, PA; lives Baltimore, MD) makes short animated films based on beautifully rendered clay-modeled figures and drawings. To create these works, the artist works alone on each aspect of the story—drawing and modeling, sets and costume design, direction, cinematography, and stop-animation shooting. The musical soundtracks are made in collaboration with composer Winston Rice and others. Her twelve-inch-tall clay figures, with hand-painted faces and hand-stitched clothing, move minimally within small, simple sets. The characters are silent, the expression on their faces static, and their bodies move in small gestures. The result is compelling and realistic, partially due to the fact that the characters' stories are developed as Yasinsky shoots the stop-motion animation. The figures reflect a soulful playfulness reminiscent of Buster Keaton.

Filmmakers are a major influence on Yasinksy, and she has reconstructed the characters and narratives of several films. A recent five-part series (based on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante) uses several animation techniques to explore different aspects of the lovers' relationship and includes a haunting six-minute black-and-white film, La Nuit (2007). Her Au Hasard Balthazar (2008), based on Robert Bresson's eponymous film, premieres at the Museum. The program also features earlier works, including Boys (2002), Animal Behavior (2003), and No Place Like Home #1 and #2 (1999).
Monday, April 28, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

LoVid: Wire-full
LoVid is the New York–based interdisciplinary artist duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. They combine many opposing elements, contrasting hard electronics and soft patchworks; handmade items and machine-produced objects; and analog and digital. This multidirectional approach is reflected in the content of their work, simultaneously romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. The artists present their performance Help Carry a Tune (2007) and perform with their Sync Armonica synthesizer. Program 90 min.
Monday, May 19, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Michael Haneke
Haneke introduces Funny Games (1997), the final film in his retrospective.
Funny Games. 1997. Austria. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. With Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe. Two men con their way into the home of a complacent Austrian family and amuse themselves by inflicting various forms of psychological and physical torture. Haneke's most explicitly assaultive film, which he has remade in an American version starring Naomi Watts, is an investigation of the razor-thin line between obscenity and pornography. "Insofar as truth is always obscene, I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity.... Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable" (Haneke). Courtesy Kino International. In German, French, Italian; English subtitles. 108 min.
Monday, October 15, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

An Evening with Kevin Everson
For just over ten years, Kevin Jerome Everson (Charlottesville, Virginia) has been making films 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 forty short 16mm, 35mm, and digital films. Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Everson frequently records family, friends, and life in the Midwest, but he has also developed art projects in Rome and elsewhere. His films look for the art in everyday life, revealing people's relationship to their crafts and focusing on the conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in communities. Much of Everson's recent work 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 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; and several premieres of shorts. Program 100 min.
Monday, October 22, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 6:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Screening only. Filmmaker not present.)

An Evening with Ernie Gehr
Ernie Gehr discusses two structuralist masterpieces separated by twenty years—Serene Velocity (1970) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991)—and relates them to his interest in pre-cinema objects and the artists who invented a "cinema of attractions," as evidenced in Gehr's works in Panoramas of the Moving Image.
Serene Velocity. 1970. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. 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. Directed by Ernie Gehr. The city of San Francisco, shot from within a glass elevator, seems to perform gravity defying acts through simple visual manipulation. 41 min. Program Approx. 90 min.
Monday, October 29, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Valerie. 2006. Germany. Directed by Birgit Moeller. Screenplay by Moeller, Ruth Rehmet, Ilja Haller, Milena Balsch, Elke Sudmann. With Agata Buzek, David Striesow. Moeller's debut feature, a recent Best Feature Film winner at the Hamptons Int’l Film Festival, 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. In German; English subtitles. 85 min.
Monday, November 5, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

An Evening with Michael Sporn
The artist takes part in a conversation with animation historian/filmmaker John Canemaker and MoMA assistant curator Joshua Siegel. The discussion is illustrated with clips from Sporn's award-winning animated films, including a new short, Pab's First Burger, and an excerpt from his feature-length work-in-progress about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Sporn's career is also traced through his commercials, public service announcements, title sequences, and visuals for the Broadway stage. Program 90 min.
Monday, November 12, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An evening with Ronald Bronstein
Filmmaker Ronald Bronstein introduces a screening of his new film, Frownland.
Frownland. 2007. USA. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein. A self-described "troll from under the bridge," the painfully awkward Keith Sontag spends his days selling coupons door-to-door and his evenings trapped in a squalid apartment situated in some particularly hellish outer ring of New York. With the most basic elements of human communication a struggle, Sontag lurches through an uncaring city, attempting to aid a suicidal friend, evict an unctuous roommate, and simply attain some measure of self-respect. With Frownland, Bronstein has made a bold and bracing film that is both a hilarious black comedy and a ragged love letter to an earlier era of independent film. Both the film and its singular hero are raw, confrontational, and, finally, unforgettable. 106 min.
Monday, November 19, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Introduced by the filmmaker)

An Evening with Joshua Mosley
Philadelphia artist Joshua 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 Biennale, 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. Program 90 min.
Monday, November 26, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

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. Program 90 min.
Monday, December 3, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Mario Rizzi
The moving image artist Mario Rizzi (b. 1962, Barletta, Italy) makes both single-screen projections and multiscreen installations. Although his base is Turin, Rizzi often takes up residence outside Italy in communities experiencing significant change. There, the artist patiently observes and films individuals coping with transformations within their societies.
Murat ve Ismail (Murat and Ismail). 2005. Turkey. Directed by Mario Rizzi. For the Ninth International Istanbul Biennial, Rizzi completed this revelatory vision of an artisanal shoemaker's shop in a popular neighborhood. Tension arises between Murat, the owner of the shop, and his impatient son, Ismail, who wants to adjust to a world in which craft no longer holds the value it once had. How can their business survive? Though stormy, their relationship is held together by the strong bonds of family. In Turkish; English subtitles. 60 min.
Monday, December 10, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Barbara Caspar
Barbara Caspar (b. 1979, Graz, Austria) studied philosophy, psychology, art, and (with Michael Haneke as a professor) film.
Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? 2007. Austria/Germany. Written and directed by Barbara Caspar. Produced by Caspar, Annette Piscane, Markus Fischer, Andrew Standen-Raz. With Carolee Schneeman, Barney Rossett, Alan Sondheim, Ira Silverberg. This multilayered feature-length documentary focuses on Kathy Acker, the highly influential author, performance artist, and sexual-liberation icon. Acker was celebrated for her raw and original writings and monologues about sex, gender, and passion, and for the vivid example she set by her own life. Acker was born in Manhattan in 1947, and she died of cancer in Tijuana in late 1997. Approx. 90 min.
Monday, December 17, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

An Evening with Jeffrey Jeturian
Toward the end of The Bet Collector's weeklong run as part of Global Lens, 2008, the director discusses his technique and his work in relation to Filipino cinema.
Kubrador (The Bet Collector). 2006. Philippines. Directed by Jeffrey Jeturian. With Gina Pareño, Fonz Deza, Soliman Cruz. Amy, the family matriarch, makes ends meet by running a small convenience store out of her home, but she is forced to supplement her income by working for an illegal numbers game. Her days follow a stressful routine of dodging the police, and her nights are filled with anxiety over the survival of her family, as she counts her meager commissions. The director's brilliant shots of the narrow, crowded streets become part of the psychological portrait of a once-proud woman reduced to working as a petty criminal. Anchoring the film is a luminous, emphatic performance by veteran actress Pareño, who makes vivid not only the daily struggle faced by the Filipino underclass, but also the humor, wit, and charisma her character applies to her unstable profession. In Tagalog; English subtitles. 98 min.
Monday, January 14, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 (Introduced by the filmmaker)

An Evening with Pascale Ferran
Ferran introduces her adaptation of Lady Chatterley (2006).
Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois (Lady Chatterley). 2006. France/Belgium. Directed by Pascale Ferran. Screenplay by Ferran, Roger Bohbot, Pierre Trividic, based on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot. Ferran's adaptation of John Thomas and Lady Jane, the remarkably different second version of Lawrence's celebrated and notorious novel, is cinema at its most sensuous, tactile, and intelligent. In depicting the erotic affair between an English aristocrat and a gamekeeper, Ferran observes, "Even more than in the final version, the story is literally overrun by vegetation. And the plant kingdom doesn't come in simply as a metaphor for the life force that brings the two protagonists together, but accompanies them constantly during their transformation. To me, that's the most beautiful thing: the story of a love that is one with the material experience of transformation." Lady Chatterley also screens on February 7, with no filmmaker introduction. In French; English subtitles. 168 min.
Monday, January 28, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Introduced by Ferran)

An Evening with Andrea Geyer: Spiral Lands_Chapter 2
Via a slide lecture, multimedia artist Geyer explores the scholar's role in the critical examination of the relationship between land and identity, and the ways in which this relationship frames and determines our (mis)understanding of the contemporary U.S. Taking the American Southwest as an example, her extensive photographic and textual historiography progresses nonlinearly from historic encounters to current situations. Program Approx. 90 min.
Monday, February 11, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Sharon Hayes: On Politics and Desire
Hayes moves between multiple mediums—sound, performance, video, and installation—in an ongoing investigation of the intersections of history, politics, and speech. Her works draw on fictional narratives and interrogations of "real world" narratives, such as the rhetoric of Presidential addresses or the audiotapes made by Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hayes presents her most recent work, which focuses on the conditions of public speech and public opinion, and on the complicated relationship between politics and desire. Program Approx. 90 min.
Monday, February 25, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Yeondoo Jung
Yeondoo Jung (Korean, b. 1969) is a photo and moving image artist whose feature-length silent work Documentary Nostalgia (2007) is quietly astonishing. Named by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul as artist of the year, Jung imagines his own biography as a series of colorful and elaborate locations that "flow" into one another. Shot in one static, unbroken take, like those found in very early film, Documentary Nostalgia records the transformation of six dense sets (room, rice field, city street, pasture, etc.) into a final cloud-capped summit. The fixed camera observes a carefully choreographed team of workers and actors changing scenes, donning costumes, and even leading cows to graze as the artist's own life swirls by. It is at once a riff on reality, a dreamy performance piece, and a genuine work of cinema. Program 90 min.
Monday, March 10, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Akram Zaatari
Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari interweaves documentary and personal narrative to examine the complicated social, political, and cultural issues of a country shaped by extended territorial conflict. His videos and installations speak of the contradictions of everyday life within regions of conflict further fragmented by media. Al Yaoum (This Day) chronicles thirty years of Lebanon, and in How I Love You, five Lebanese men speak about their passions and relationships. Presented in conjunction with Asian Contemporary Art Week. For more information, visit www.acaw.net. Program 90 min.
Monday, March 17, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

An Evening with Kazuhiro Soda
The filmmaker introduces his debut feature, Campaign, as part of Contemporasian. The film will also be shown on April 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, with no filmmaker introduction.
Senkyo (Campaign). 2007. Japan. Directed by Kazuhiro Soda. Soda's debut feature, shot in cinéma vérité style, follows his former Tokyo University classmate Kazuhiko Yamauchi's run as a "parachute" candidate for Japan's powerful Liberal Democratic Party in a crucial local district. With no prior experience in politics, no supporters, a lack of charisma, and dwindling funds, Yamauchi's greatest asset is his ability to keep smiling under any circumstances, amid humiliations public, political, and private. This fly-on-the-wall view of street-level politics cleverly reveals much about the true nature of "democracy." In Japanese; English subtitles. 119 min.
Monday, April 7, 2008, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Discussion with Soda)