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

The Gene Siskel Film Center presents "Robert Bresson," a series of thirteen feature films and one short representing the total oeuvre of one of the cinema's most distinctive and uncompromising artists. All films are being shown in 35mm prints, many of them recently struck and/or imported from Europe.

Born in the Auvergne region of central France, Robert Bresson (1901-1999) began as a painter before switching to the cinema, and he always believed that cinema was closer to painting than to theater or photography. During World War II, Bresson was a prisoner of war for nearly a year-an experience that strongly influenced the themes of freedom and imprisonment that would be so central to his films. His first feature films, Les anges du péché (1943) and Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), demonstrated a remarkable command of the film medium, although Bresson later considered them to be severely compromised by their use of professional actors, hired screenwriters, and conventional music scores.

Bresson progressively eliminated those impurities in Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)-films which distilled his unique style and solidified his reputation as a major director. Bresson's uncompromising approach had limited his output to six films in 22 years. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he entered into a relatively prolific period with Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), Une femme douce (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), and Lancelot of the Lake (1974).

These films represent the full flowering of Bresson's mature style, marked by the casting of non-actors rigorously directed to suppress superfluous emotion; the sparse use of "found" scores of classical music; a masterful command of ellipsis to suggest rather than show; the elevation of the soundtrack to equal importance with the imagetrack; themes of spiritual exaltation and despair; and a formal refinement often characterized as austere, although precise might be a better term.

Bresson's final two films, The Devil Probably (1977) and L'argent (1983), are bracing works whose withering vision of the modern world verges on the nihilistic. His plans to follow this apocalyptic diptych with a filming of the Book of Genesis never came to pass.

Although his final film was made almost 30 years ago, and his style is famously idiosyncratic, Bresson's reputation and influence have continued to grow. As Village Voice critic J. Hoberman has written, "There is scarcely a major European director to emerge since 1960 who does not in some way show the influence of Robert Bresson." Michael Haneke, Jia Zhangke, the Dardenne Brothers, Olivier Assayas, and Lynne Ramsay are just a few of the important contemporary directors who cite Bresson as a formative influence on their own work.

The "Robert Bresson" tour has been organized by the TIFF Cinematheque. Special thanks to James Quandt.

Featured Works:

Public Affairs (1934); Les anges du péché (1943); Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945); Diary of a Country Priest (1951); A Man Escaped (1956); Pickpocket (1959, pictured); The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962); Au Hasard Balthazar (1966); Mouchette (1967); Une femme douce (1969); Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971); Lancelot of the Lake (1974); The Devil Probably (1977); L'argent (1983)

Program information:

Robert Bresson

Film Forum

Bresson

January 6-19, 2012

Harvard Film Archive

The Complete Robert Bresson

January 20-February 19, 2012

Pacific Film Archive

Austere Perfectionism: The Films of Robert Bresson

January 19-February 25, 2012

TIFF Cinematheque

The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson

February 9-March 30, 2012

Featured Works:

Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996); Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996); Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997); Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998); Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999); The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001); Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002, pictured); The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004); The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007); There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Program information:

Anderson & Anderson: Wes and P.T.

Featured Works:

Lightning (1952); Floating Clouds (1955); A Wife's Heart (1956); Flowing (1956); Untamed (1957); Daughters, Wives and a Mother (1960); When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960); A Wanderer's Notebook (1962, pictured); Yearning (1964)

Program information:

Naruse & Takamine: Of an Auteur and an Actress

This series celebrates the work of one of the most-loved directors of classical Hollywood cinema. A consummate professional, Howard Hawks (1896-1977) directed more than forty films, completing his first features at the end of the silent era. Often working as both director and independent producer, Hawks maintained his autonomy within the studio system, allowing him control over his own destiny as an artist. Influenced by John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Josef von Sternberg, Hawks directed films in every Hollywood genre: screwball comedies, dramas, gangster films, action adventures, Westerns, science fiction, musical comedies. But no matter the genre, he would make a quintessentially Hawksian film.

Favoring a simple, clear visual style, Hawks was an action director par excellence; few filmmakers have rivaled his speed. Making the transition from silent to sound cinema, he found that he could use rapid-fire dialogue to increase narrative velocity. Yet he relied heavily on actions, not words, to convey his characters' feelings. Hawks's personal credo that "man is the measure of all things" motivates his filmmaking. First and foremost, the Hawksian hero is measured by his (and, less frequently, her) work, and professionalism and camaraderie are paramount in Hawks's films.

Continuing through mid-April, this series surveys the full range of the director's career, including several rarely screened silents. It demonstrates that, like a composer writing a theme and variations, Hawks repeatedly treats the same themes, situations, and actions, transposed from one genre to the next, with a remarkable unity of style.

Featured Works:

25 films

Program information:

Howard Hawks: The Measure of Man

Discover the wild worlds of Soviet sci-fi in this mixture of acknowledged classics, exotic esoterica and outright pulp from the former Eastern bloc. Bearded ladies, post-apocalyptic wastelands, robot companions, vampire cars and outbursts of random dancing await.

Featured Works:

The Silent Star (Kurt Maetzig, 1960); Ikarie XB-1 (Jindrich Polák, 1963); Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Václav Vorlícek, 1966); I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (Oldrich Lipsky, 1970); Eolomea (Herrmann Zschoche, 1972); Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972); Adolescents in the Universe (Richard Viktorov, 1974); Moscow-Cassiopeia (Richard Viktorov, 1975); In the Dust of the Stars (Gottfried Kolditz, 1976); The Great Space Voyage (Valentin Selivanov, 1976); Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (Grigori Kromanov, 1979); Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979); Test Pilot Pirxa (Marek Piestrak, 1979); Golem (Piotr Szulkin, 1980); Ferat Vampire (Juraj Herz, 1982); To the Stars by Hard Ways (Richard Viktorov, 1982, pictured)

Program information:

Attack the Bloc: Cold War Science Fiction from Behind the Iron Curtain

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

One of cinema's singular visionaries, Josef von Sternberg masterminded some of the most idiosyncratic Hollywood entertainments of the 1920s and '30s. Famous for meticulously concocting exotic locales on Paramount's back lot, Sternberg used breathtaking imagery to tell wry, knowing tales of doomed love. The director pursued total control over his projects, often acting as uncredited writer, cinemato­grapher, and editor, ensuring that each frame bore his unmistakable personal stamp. Although justly celebrated for his visual style, Sternberg was also among the first directors to fully grasp the power of sound, as exemplified in the proto-noir talkie Thunderbolt. This retrospective also contains one of Sternberg's great silent films (The Docks of New York), six of von Stern­berg's canonical, matchless collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, and two adaptations of literary classics (Crime and Punishment and An American Tragedy).

Featured Works:

The Docks of New York (1928); Thunderbolt (1929); Morocco (1930, pictured); The Blue Angel (1930); An American Tragedy (1931); Blonde Venus (1932); Shanghai Express (1932); The Scarlet Empress (1934); Crime and Punishment (1935); The Devil Is a Woman (1935); The King Steps Out (1936)

Program information:

Josef von Sternberg: The Exotic and the Decadent

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

The films of Gregory J. Markopoulos, a leading figure of the American avant-garde and the world of art cinema, have been almost impossible to see during the past forty years. Markopoulos (1928-92) had very specific views on how his films should be exhibited and, in 1967 when he moved from the United States to Europe, made the decision to withdraw his films from distribution. From that point forward, Markopoulos concentrated his limited resources solely on the production of new work. For the next twenty-some years, he and his lifelong companion Robert Beavers devoted their energies to the Temenos, an archive, library, and outdoor theater in Lyssaraia, Greece. Between 1970 and 1990, Markopoulos created over one hundred works, which he arranged into twenty-two film cycles. Since Markopoulos's death, Beavers has devoted much of his time to raising funds for the Temenos Foundation and the preservation of Markopoulos's films.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, to Greek-immigrant parents, Markopoulos was twelve when he made his first film, A Christmas Carol. As a teen, he studied with Josef von Sternberg, a director who was "among the few Hollywood filmmakers Markopoulos felt matched his filmic ideal, and in his work there are echoes of Sternberg's depiction of erotic passion" (Jones).

Following in the tradition of directors like Jean Cocteau and Jean Vigo, Markopoulos was a poet filmmaker whose work falls intro three main categories: mythic themes, film portraits, and films of place. Often taking his inspiration from classic literary works, Markopoulos forged new terrain as a filmmaker exploring abstract narratives. His poetic approach relied heavily on the expressive, even mannerist use of color, composition, rhythm, and fractured temporal structures. He achieved a harmonious and delicate balance of plot, character, and theme. Markopoulos's ideas on narrative form are expressed in his 1963 essay "Towards a New Narrative Film Form."

Central to his cinema was the theme of Eros. "Color is Eros," he claimed in an early note on Psyche. Sensual and elegant, Markopoulos's films concern themselves with beauty and form, sometimes expressing homoerotic love in psychological and dramatic terms (Lysis; Twice a Man, pictured). In his films of place, Markopoulos's response to the beauty of the world was conveyed in a more purely Romantic style apparent in his exquisite architectural studies (represented in this series by Ming Green).

By the late fifties and early sixties, Markopoulos was one of the most prominent figures of the American independent cinema along with Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith. His films, which were screened in Europe, had an important influence on the French New Wave directors.

Featured Works:

Don't miss this rare opportunity to view eleven of Markopolous's films, made in the United States between 1940 and 1967.

Program information:

Seconds of Eternity: The Films of Gregory J. Markopoulos

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

Park Kwang-su (b. 1955) is the central voice, if not the progenitor, of the remarkable Korean New Wave of the late 1980s and 1990s. In major films such as To the Starry Island, A Single Spark and The Uprising, Park introduced a new political outspokenness into popular Korean cinema, an emboldened realist address of urgent, and frequently controversial, socio-cultural and historical themes. Although little known in the U.S., Park played a crucial role in shaping South Korea's first authentic independent film movement by challenging the long tradition of draconian government censorship renewed with new severity in the wake of the 1980 Kwangju Massacre. Transforming quintessentially Korean themes into thought-provoking and deeply engaging narrative features, Park's films helped introduce contemporary South Korean cinema to its first truly international audience-a cause dramatically furthered by Park's founding of the Pusan International Film Festival in 1996.

Beginning his artistic career first as a sculptor at Seoul National University, Park's blossoming interest in cinema led him into a Super-8 collective and, upon graduation, the Seoul Film Group, an activist film club closely tied to the vibrant student protest movement. Study at Paris' ESEC film school introduced Park to the rich tradition of political counter-cinema which would directly inform the subject and tone of his extraordinary first feature, Chilsu and Mansu, which subversively transforms the popular formula of the "buddy" comedy into an angry portrait of working class disenchantment. Park's subsequent films continued this subtle politicization of popular film genres in order to engage a range of once-taboo themes, using, for example, the biopic in A Single Spark to explore the troubled history of Korean labor unions, or The Uprising's historical epic to give new perspective on Korea's difficult colonial legacy. United by their stylish sophistication and structure, Park's critically acclaimed films of the late 1980s and 1990s together represent one of the highpoints in contemporary Korean cinema. With Park Kwang-su in person.

Featured Works:

Chilsu and Mansu (Chilsu wa Mansu, 1988); The Black Republic (Keduldo urichurum, 1990, pictured); To the Starry Island (Ku som e gago sipta, 1993); A Single Spark (Jeon tae-il, 1995); The Uprising (Yi Chae-su ui nan, 1999)

Program information:

Park Kwang-su and the Origins of the Korean New Wave

Independent filmmaker Nina Menkes has secured a distinct and indispensable position within the international film avant-garde. Her collected works, honored by international awards and critical accolades, iconoclastically and passionately map a psychic universe characterized by entropy-implicitly churning with destructive, if undeniably vital, power. Disconnectedness haunts Menkes' work, as human figures negotiate steep slopes of trauma, self-definition and survival, against a generalized existential plane that seems unconcerned with such considerations. This tension is metaphorically figured by technical means, including precisely attenuated camerawork and sound design that invert the usual hierarchy between human subjects and their supposedly secondary backdrops. The tenuous position of subjective beings in such a universe is most superbly realized in the person of Menkes' frequent onscreen subject (and off-screen collaborator) Tinka Menkes, whose implacable visage is a perfect riposte to a violent world. But Menkes also describes the work of filmmaking as "sorcery," and indeed she wields a potent magic, introducing liberating mysteries: the riderless horse, the roulette wheel and the mysterious talisman constitute enigmatic and tantalizing signposts to alternate possibilities. The Archive is pleased to welcome Nina Menkes (a graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television) to this survey of her momentous work.

Featured Works:

A Soft Warrior (1981); The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983); Magdalena Viraga (1986); Queen of Diamonds (1991); The Bloody Child (1996); Phantom Love (2007, pictured); Dissolution (2010)

Program information:

Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery