Jim Henson's Fantastic World celebrates the internationally known creative genius Jim Henson, whose work encompassed film, television, and puppetry. The exhibition features over 120 artifacts, including drawings, storyboards, and props, all of which illustrate Henson's boundless creativity and innumerable accomplishments.

Fifteen iconic puppets, including Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, Rowlf, and Bert and Ernie, are on view, along with photographs of Henson and his collaborators at work and excerpts from his early projects and experimental films. The exhibition spans Henson's entire career, with drawings, cartoons, and posters produced during his college years in the late 1950s and objects related to the inspired imaginary world of his popular 1982 fantasy film, The Dark Crystal. The exhibition features artifacts from Henson's best-known projects, The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie and its sequels, Fraggle Rock, and Sesame Street, in addition to materials from Sam and Friends, an early show he created in the 1950s, and his pioneering television commercial work in the 1960s.

Every weekend, Moving Image will present public programs related to the exhibition for audiences of all ages, including screenings, hands-on workshops, and exclusive special events with personal appearances by Henson's close collaborators and family members. Click here for detailed program information.

Jim Henson's Fantastic World was organized by The Jim Henson Legacy and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in cooperation with the Henson family, The Jim Henson Company, The Muppets Studio, LLC, and Sesame Workshop. This exhibition is made possible by the BIO channel. Additional support has been provided by The Jane Henson Foundation and Cheryl Henson.

Program information:

Jim Henson's Fantastic World

Related Articles:
Henson & Oz by Ken Cancelosi and Matt Zoller Seitz posted Jul. 15, 2011

You've heard it before: "You've got to see it on the big screen!" And it's true-some movies loom large and need to be seen large. They were intended for the theater, and in our mind's eye that's where they stay. Despite the cultural domination of television starting in the 1950s, and the current onslaught of new methods of viewing on ever-shrinking devices (laptops, iPads, phones), cinema remains a large-format art form. The experience of watching a movie in a dark theater, its images flickering before us on a screen that dwarfs us, its sound surrounding us, is the source of the medium's singular enchantment, and certain films have been able to harness this power particularly well: those visually stunning classics that just aren't the same when shrunk down. This series showcases a selection of such films-including grand Hollywood epics, eye-popping sci-fi journeys, and chilling visions of horror-in the Museum's beautiful new theater.

When it opened earlier this year as a centerpiece of the Museum's renovation and expansion, the theater immediately became one of the most impressive screening spaces in the country; New York magazine called it "the best new theater for old movies." Conceived by architect Thomas Leeser as a capsule for the imaginary voyage of moviegoing, the theater has a wraparound ceiling and walls made of 1,136 fabric panels in a sensuous, vibrant Yves Klein blue, altering the viewer's depth perception and encouraging a sensation of being suspended in the space. With a screen of classic proportions and projection equipment for every format from 16mm to 70mm and high-definition digital 3D, the theater provides an unsurpassed filmgoing experience. "See It Big!" is thus a celebration of the Museum's new theater as well as the magnificent films in the series.

Featured Works:

An ongoing series guest-curated by Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert.

Program information:

See It Big!

Related Articles:
All Things Shining, Pt 5 by Serena Bramble and Matt Zoller Seitz posted Oct. 24, 2011
Looking Up by Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert posted Nov. 10, 2011
Hang It on a Wall by Chris Wisniewski posted Dec. 27, 2011

Founded in 1963, as the auteur theory and European cinematic modernism were crashing on to the shores of American film culture, the New York Film Festival stands as the second-oldest film festival in North America, and one of the oldest in the world. As we count down to NYFF's historic 50th edition in 2012, the Film Society is proud to present a year-long retrospective of highlights from the festival's first 49 years, as curated by past and present members of the NYFF selection committee.

Featured Works:

The Hunt (Carlos Saura, 1966); 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967); The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1967); My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969); Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, pictured); L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969); The Debut (Gleb Panfilov, 1970); Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)

Program information:

50 Years of the New York Film Festival

Featured Works:

The Thing (1982); Christine (1983); Starman (1984); Big Trouble in Little China (1986); Prince of Darkness (1987); They Live (1988); Village of the Damned (1995); Escape from L.A. (1996, pictured); Vampires (1998)

Program information:

Cult Carpenter

From his early horror movies-with their exploding heads, mutating sex organs, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects-to his latest, A Dangerous Method, a deceptively classical period film about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the birth of psychoanalysis, David Cronenberg has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh. "I think of human beings as a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical, and both of these things have their say at every moment we're alive," says Cronenberg. "My films are some kind of strange metaphysical passion play." Moving deftly between genre and arthouse filmmaking, between original screenplays and literary adaptations, Cronenberg's work is thematically consistent and marked by a rigorous intelligence, a keen sense of humor, and a fearless engagement with the nature of human existence. He has been exploring the most primal themes since the beginning of his career, and continues to probe them with growing maturity and depth.

Featured Works:

Crimes of the Future (1970); Stereo (1969); They Came From Within (1975); Rabid (1977); Fast Company (1979); The Brood (1979); Dead Ringers (1988); Scanners (1981); The Dead Zone (1983); Videodrome (1983); The Fly (1986); Naked Lunch (1991, pictured); M. Butterfly (1993); Crash (1996); eXistenZ (1999); Spider (2002); Eastern Promises (2007); A History of Violence (2005)

Program information:

David Cronenberg

Related Articles:
Physical Instincts by Gina Telaroli posted Jan. 20, 2012
They Came From Within by Miriam Bale posted Jan. 20, 2012
Laws of Desire by Tom McCormack posted Jan. 26, 2012
Migrating Forms by Joshua Land posted Feb. 03, 2012

Prodigious, poetic, and unlike any other "history" of cinema, Mark Cousins's The Story of Film: An Odyssey is, as the title promises, a thrilling journey. Cousins's personal voyage-complete with side-trips and retraced steps-is an illuminating, idiosyncratic tour of the emotional and intellectual pleasures of cinema.

Featured Works:

Framed in eight chapters, with a combined running time of 15 hours, the film is a treasure trove of clips from films both famous and underappreciated, interviews from a global who's-who of filmmakers, and passionate, provocative commentary.

Program information:

The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Hailed as visionary by the likes of Susan Sontag, Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the films of Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr seem like the triumphant last breaths of a certain school of European cinematic modernism-a feeling only intensified by Tarr's announcement that his latest film, the widely acclaimed The Turin Horse, will be his last. Indebted to Tarkovsky and his countryman Miklós Jancsó, Tarr began as a maker of piercing, social-realist dramas focused on the desperate lives of the proletariat class, before achieving auteur superstardom in the 1990s for a series of black-and-white, Communist-era allegories made in close partnership with novelist László Krasznahorkai (Damnation, Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies). Each of the later films is marked by Tarr's celebrated use of long, elaborately choreographed tracking shots in which camera and actors seem locked in a hypnotic dance-ravishing cinema that demands to be seen on the largest possible screens. Following his triumphant appearance at the 2011 New York Film Festival, we are pleased to present this rare "complete" retrospective of one of the world's greatest living filmmakers, culminating in the U.S. theatrical premiere of The Turin Horse at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Featured Works:

Complete retrospective

Program information:

The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr

Cineteca di Bologna

Until the end of the world: The Films of Béla Tarr

February 2-12, 2012

Related Articles:
Multiple Vision by Aaron Cutler posted Feb. 02, 2012

Although he passed away last September at the age of 69, George Kuchar will forever remain an immortal of cinema. Whether shooting 8mm films with his twin brother Mike in the 1950s and early '60s, crafting his own precociously irreverent 16mm productions, staging over-the-top productions with students at the San Francisco Art Institute, or churning out poignant video diaries, George was forever busy making yet another movie. He lived to film, loved to laugh, and looms large over generations of artists, filmmakers, and admirers, all of who have been delivered by his works to great heights of delightful delirium. Beyond prolific, George made literally hundreds of hysterically heartfelt, outrageously ingenious, incredibly inventive, and impossible-to-pigeonhole works that continue to astound new audiences and create instant fans.

Featured Works:

Anthology had a lengthy relationship with George, and in the last decade preserved much of his earliest work, including films made while still a teenager. These works screen regularly in the Essential Cinema series, so for these special memorial screenings Anthology asked George's longtime distributors to share some of their favorite pieces. To round out the series Anthology is also spotlighting works from the collections of Harvard Film Archive and Pacific Film Archive. If you've never seen a Kuchar film, now is your opportunity to dive in with some of his very best.

Program information:

George Kuchar 1942-2011

Established in 2001, MoMA's annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and media takes place each February. This international selection of films presents a wide range of creative categories that extends the idea of the documentary form, examines the relationship between contemporary art and nonfiction filmmaking, and reflects on new areas of nonfiction practice.

Featured Works:

This year's festival includes both feature-length and short documentary films, a retrospective of works from Paper Tiger Television's 30 years of media activism, and a seminar on database documentary practices-an emergent form of interactive narrative and nonlinear filmmaking that employs computer and Web-based media. The majority of films in the festival are New York City premieres, and filmmakers will be present at most screenings. Special off-site events take place at Light Industry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (Centerpiece), and at Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Closing Night).

Program information:

Documentary Fortnight 2012: MoMA's International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media

"I don't like the cartoon," said the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, "and I prefer to place my imaginary world into reality." While Svankmajer's films are dreamlike in tone, seemingly coming directly from his deepest imagination, they are also rooted in physical reality. Svankmajer (b. 1934) photographs household objects, including trash, food, furniture, and clocks, and often uses puppets as his main characters. His films are delightfully subversive, perhaps as a response to the oppressive nature of life in Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Iron Curtain. This selection of Svankmajer's features and short films is presented with support from the Czech Center New York.

Featured Works:

Flat (Byt, 1968); The Garden (Zahrada, 1968); Dimensions of Dialogue (Moznosti Dialogu, 1971); Jabberwocky (1971); Alice (1988); Another Kind of Love (1988); Faust (1994); Conspirators of Pleasure (1996, pictured); Lunacy (2005)

Program information:

The Films of Jan Svankmajer

Anthology is overjoyed to pay tribute to the astonishingly inventive, always uncompromising, and altogether remarkable experimental theater company The Wooster Group. For over 35 years the Group has been exploding the conventions of theater and performance by radically reworking canonical plays (by Eugene O'Neill, Racine, Chekhov, Gertrude Stein, and others), combining wildly disparate cultural texts and references (their pieces have incorporated Japanese theater and film, vaudeville, B-movies, and much more), and pioneering the use of video and other multimedia tools in their productions.

The Group's crucial place in the annals of downtown NYC alternative culture, as well as their impressive longevity, suggest parallels with Anthology itself-they were even neighbors for several years in the mid-'70s, when Anthology was located at 80 Wooster, just down the block from the Performing Garage, the Group's longtime headquarters.

Featured Works:

As such, it is entirely appropriate that Anthology honors the Group with this extensive series, an embarrassment of riches bringing together the official video versions of some of the company's productions, archival documentation of many other works, films and videos, and a very special event featuring TWG members reading from three unproduced screenplays they have created over the years.

Focusing on the period 1975-2005, the series captures the extraordinary confluence of gifted theater artists who formed and sustained the Group through its first three decades-including founders Elizabeth LeCompte-the Group's visionary director-and Spalding Gray, and performers Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, Peyton Smith, Ari Fliakos, and Scott Shepherd, among many others. To demonstrate the full scope of the Group's boundless creativity, Anthology will also be presenting a sidebar series showcasing the many fascinating films and videos that have featured performances from various of the Group's members, as well as three programs devoted to the work of Ken Kobland, a filmmaker who has been collaborating with the Wooster Group for decades.

This series coincides with the Wooster Group's latest production, "Early Plays," based on the Glencairn Plays by Eugene O'Neill; a collaboration with New York City Players, the production is adapted and directed by Richard Maxwell, and will be taking place at St. Ann's Warehouse from February 15-March 4. For more info, visit stannswarehouse.org

Program information:

The Wooster Group on Film and Video and At Large