For more than four decades, Wiseman has used a lightweight 16mm camera and portable sound equipment to study human behavior in all its contradictory and unpredictable manifestations, particularly in institutional or regimented situations where authority creates an imbalance of power, or where democracy is at work. Like the great novelists of the 19th century, Wiseman combines epic narrative with intimate portraiture. His films comprise a grand panorama of American life (and more recently, the cultural life of Paris)-a kind of modern-day comédie humaine that, quite astonishingly, never loses its vitality or its currency. And though Wiseman approaches his subjects-doctors, ballet dancers, soldiers, students, welfare recipients, factory workers, fashion models, zookeepers, victims of domestic violence, Benedictine monks, the terminally ill-with a minimum of intrusion or influence, he brings a sensitive but trustworthy eye, a lawyer's penetrating skepticism, and the dramatic impulses of a storyteller to arrive at what Eugène Ionesco, one of his favorite playwrights, called an "imaginative truth." All films are directed, edited, and produced by Wiseman and from the U.S.

Featured Works:

To celebrate the recent acquisition of newly struck prints of 36 films by Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930, Boston), the Museum of Modern Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of the director's work. Featuring three to four films each month, this yearlong survey opens with Basic Training (1971, pictured), followed by a conversation with Wiseman and curator Josh Siegel, and spans his entire career, from Titicut Follies (1967) to his two most recent projects, La Danse-The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and Boxing Gym (2010).  

Program information:

Frederick Wiseman

Maya Deren (American, 1917-1961) was a visionary of American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. A precocious student, she studied poetry and literature at New York University and Smith College, where she became interested in the arts. While working for modern-dance choreographer Katherine Dunham, Deren met her future husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to European avant-garde film. In 1943, the couple collaborated on the short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which has since become one of the most widely influential films of the American experimental-film movement.

Deren, who received the first Guggenheim Foundation grant for "creative work in the field of motion pictures" and formed the Creative Film Foundation to broaden support for experimental film, continued making and self-distributing her own films and lecturing and writing about avant-garde cinema theory until her untimely death at the age of forty-four. Her pioneering formal innovations-performing in front of the camera, using semiautobiographical content, and meshing literary, psychological, and ethnographic disciplines with rigorous technique-inspired future generations of experimental filmmakers.

Featured Works:

This exhibition, which consists of a video installation in the Theater Galleries and short-film programs in the theaters, examines Deren's legacy through both her own work and that of a trio of women directors upon whom she had an indelible influence: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich.

Program information:

Maya Deren's Legacy: Women and Experimental Film

When Eric Rohmer died in January at the age of 89, he left behind an inimitable body of work that had beguiled critics and moviegoers for a half-century, even if they found it difficult to pinpoint Rohmer's particular je ne sais quoi. The most overtly literary of the French New Wave directors, eternally fascinated by the mysteries of human attraction, Rohmer was prized for his wry, insightful dialogue, but undervalued for a deceptively simple visual style, of which the writer Gilbert Adair noted: "He knew, in short, how to film what D.W. Griffith called ‘the wind in the trees,' how to film air." In celebration of this extraordinary career, we are delighted to present the most complete North American retrospective of Rohmer's work in more than a decade, including all of his feature films, the U.S. premiere of his 1980 TV film Catherine de Heilbronn, plus special in-person appearances by key Rohmer collaborators.

Featured Works:

Veronique and Her Dunce (Eric Rohmer, 1958); The Sign of Leo (Eric Rohmer, 1959); Présentation or Charlotte and Her Steak (Eric Rohmer, 1960); Suzanne's Career (Eric Rohmer, 1963); The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Eric Rohmer, 1963); Nadja à Paris (Eric Rohmer, 1964); On Pascal (Eric Rohmer, 1965); Six in Paris (Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, and Jean Rouch, 1965); A Modern Coed (Eric Rohmer, 1966); La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967); My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969, pictured); Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, 1970); Chloe in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer, 1972); The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976); Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, 1978); Catherine de Heilbronn (Eric Rohmer, 1980); The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981); A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, 1982); Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, 1983); Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer, 1984); Summer (Eric Rohmer, 1986); Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Eric Rohmer, 1987); Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987); A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer, 1990); A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992); The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (Eric Rohmer, 1993); Eric Rohmer: Preuves à l'appui (André S. Labarthe and Jean Douchet, 1994); Rendezvous in Paris (Eric Rohmer, 1995); A Summer's Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1996); Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1998); The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, 2001); Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer, 2004); The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, 2007)

Program information:

The Sign of Rohmer

TIFF Cinematheque

July 29-August 10, 2010

In Memoriam: Eric Rohmer (1920-2010)-Rohmer's Six Moral Tales

Harvard Film Archive

August 20-August 30

The Human Comedies of Eric Rohmer

Ida Lupino (American, b. Great Britain, 1918-1995) was branded the "English Jean Harlow" when she arrived in Hollywood in 1932, but as part of a distinguished British theatrical dynasty, she aspired to be more than an ingenue or femme fatale. A box-office-proven actress with a lucrative contract at Warner Bros., Lupino conscientiously studied the work of the directors for whom she acted, and before long she found her way behind the camera. Her career as a feature film director (albeit an uncredited one) began in 1949, when she stepped in for the ailing Elmer Clifton on the set of Not Wanted. Soon thereafter Lupino established her own production company, The Filmmakers, and from 1949 to 1966 she nurtured a successful dual career as an A-list actress and a pioneering filmmaker dedicated to the production of films investigating the social condition of women in contemporary society. Lupino-who referred to herself as Mother on set and had a director's chair with "Mother of Us All" embroidered on the back-commenced a directorial career at a time when Hollywood was unaccustomed to women powerbrokers. The American cinema of the late 1940s was booming with directors like Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, who were attracted to stories about thorny social issues and ordinary folk. These narratives fascinated Lupino, who later made half a dozen films focusing on topics once considered taboo for the commercial film industry-unwanted pregnancy, polio, bigamy, and women competing in a world of men. Ida Lupino: Mother Directs presents select films from 1949 through 1966, when she managed to brilliantly balance careers in front of and behind the camera. All films are from the U.S.

Featured Works:

They Drive by Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940); Lust for Gold (S. Sylvan Simon, 1949); Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, 1949); Woman in Hiding (Michael Gordon, 1949); Never Fear (The Young Lovers, Ida Lupino, 1950); Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950); Hard, Fast, and Beautiful (Ida Lupino, 1951); On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1951); Beware My Lovely (Harry Horner, 1952); While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Program information:

Ida Lupino: Mother Directs

With just two features and half a dozen shorts to his name, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema, developing an exhilaratingly original, truly head-scratching, and inexplicably beguiling approach to filmmaking. Combining the meta-fictional gamesmanship and mystery of Jacques Rivette with the blurring of documentary and narrative modes that has proven a favored (and highly productive) strategy of many of today's most gifted filmmakers (Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ulrich Seidl, and others), Gomes has confidently staked out a territory all his own. His most recent feature film, Our Beloved Month of August is truly something new under the sun, a category-exploding whatsit that's nevertheless so seductive and effortlessly compelling from moment to moment that its wanderings between different cinematic realms (conceived as a fictional film, it transformed itself into a documentary on summer music festivals in rural Portugal when the funding fell through, only to grope its way back towards fiction during production) ultimately seem almost irrelevant.

Featured Works:

The New York theatrical premiere run of Our Beloved Month of August (pictured), alongside screenings of Gomes's earlier shorts and debut feature The Face You Deserve (2004).

Program information:

The Films of Miguel Gomes

Northwest Film Forum

September 14-16, 2010

The Portuguese Melodies of Miguel Gomes

Harvard Film Archive

September 17-18, 2010

The Musical Imagination of Miguel Gomes

Barbara Hammer (American, b. 1939) is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality. In the late 1960s she was drawn to experimental film while studying film at San Francisco State University. During that time she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach to directing. Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than 80 films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history. Hammer says, "It is a political act to work and speak as a lesbian artist in the dominant art world and to speak as an avant-garde artist to a lesbian and gay audience. My presence and voice address both issues of homophobia [and] the need for an emerging community to explore a new imagination."

Featured Works:

Schizy (1968); Dyketactics (1974); Menses (1974); Sisters! (1974); Women's Rites or Truth Is the Daughter of Time (1974); Jane Brakhage (1975); Moon Goddess (1975); Superdyke (1975); Home (1976); Superdyke Meets Madame X (1976); Women I Love (1976); The Great Goddess (1977); Double Strength (1978); Pond and Waterfall (1981); Pools (1981); Sync Touch (1981, pictured); The Lesbos Film (1981); Audience (1982); Tourist (1984); Optic Nerve (1985); Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape (1985); Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (1986); Place Mattes (1987); Endangered (1988); Still Point (1989); Vital Signs(1989); Sanctus (1990); Nitrate Kisses (1992); Out in South Africa (1995); Tender Fictions (1995); The Female Closet (1998); Two Bad Daughters (1998); Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000); History Lessons (2000); My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities (2001); Resisting Paradise (2003); Lover/Other (2006); A Horse Is Not a Metaphor (2008); Generations (2010)

Program information:
Barbara Hammer

Gamblers betting it all in games they can't win, samurais heading into their final battles, lovers realizing their bonds are no match for an uncaring destiny: Welcome to the remarkable universe of Masahiro Shinoda. A spectacular filmmaker key to the Japanese New Wave, Shinoda was fascinated by both traditional Japanese aesthetics and the modernity of cinema.

Featured Works:

Mr. Shinoda will be in attendance for the tribute presented as part of the 150th Anniversary Celebration of Japan-NYC Friendship.

Program information:

Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda