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)

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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

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).

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

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)

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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)

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Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery

The third New Festival at the Centre Pompidou offers the public the chance to discover the diversity of the visual culture of our time and to appreciate how the territory of contemporary culture has broadened.

No fewer than one hundred artists including the film director Guy Maddin, visual artists and performers, writers and historians, musicians and show-men, explore new "ways of creating worlds." They have been invited to this third New Festival, which brings together, among other things, memory and childhood, ghosts and spectres, teleportation and dreams of experiences.

Guy Maddin is a familiar figure at the Centre Pompidou, which showed a substantial retrospective of his work in 2009 ("Guy Maddin, The Magician of Winnipeg," from 15 October to 7 November 2009). However, A New Festival offers the film-maker the opportunity to carry out an actual film-making exercise in the Centre itself. Through "Spiritisms," Maddin works with lost or abandoned scripts and projects of great figures in cinema such as Vigo, Von Stroheim and Mizoguchi, among others, rewritten with the help of the American poet John Ashbery.

These seventeen short films (each between three and five minutes) will be filmed daily in front of the public and the film produced will be broadcast live on http://spiritismes.centrepompidou.fr

The spiritual dimension of Maddin's project involves him invoking the spirits of these unfinished film projects before beginning each session of filming, putting his actors into a trance state, the original set being a room designed for spiritualist séances.

The Spiritisms project therefore echoes the last full-length film by the director, Keyhole, based on the logic of dreams.

Featured Works:

These 17 sessions of "spiritisms" will be brought together in an ambitious international project, launched at the Centre Pompidou, which will also include some one hundred other short films, made during the Biennale in Sao Paolo and at MoMA in New-York in particular. Guy Maddin's idea is to create a site which would enable the surfer to combine a certain number of these films in a random way, by his choice of word-object-sound combination. Narratives will thus be formed from different short films, each time creating a new combination.

Shootings with Amira Casar, Géraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Demy, Adèle Haenel, Udo Kier, Ariane Labed, Isild Le Besco, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, André Wilms.

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Guy Maddin, "Spiritisms"

Michael Snow, born in Toronto in 1929, is one of the most influential artists of the past half-century. Among his multiple disciplines-improvisational jazz, painting, sculpture, video installations, photography-film is the medium which secured his breakthrough at the end of 1960s and to which he owes his central position in contemporary art. Film curators and critics advanced Snow's work long before the art world recognized his importance. His "structuralist epics" (J. Hoberman) such as Wavelength (1967), La Région centrale (1971), Rameau's Nephew (1974) and So Is This (1982) are regarded as milestones of a "cinema of thought" which puts the relationship between image and viewer at the center of the work.

Featured Works:

Many of Michael Snow's works are continually screened in the Film Museum's ongoing cycle What is Film. Therefore, the series In person: Michael Snow and the parallel exhibition at the Vienna Secession focus more on those aspects of his work that are lesser known in Austria. They also offer the rare opportunity to experience Michael Snow in talks about his oeuvre.

The four programs of the series deal with Snow's early work (including the animated A to Z from 1956 and New York Eye and Ear Control, propelled by the music of Albert Ayler); with Wavelength, as a core moment of his work, leading to a witty remake of sorts, the 2003 WVLNT-Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time; with his feature-length exploration of the digital medium (*Corpus Callosum, 2002); and with two other major works made right after Wavelength: ↔ (Back and Forth) and One Second in Montreal (both 1969).

Michael Snow will be present for introductions and Q&As at all screenings. The event is held in cooperation with the Vienna Secession: The Secession exhibition "Michael Snow. Recent Works" (February 23 to April 15, 2012) presents both new installations and photographic works.

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In person: Michael Snow

Hal Hartley and special guests in person at all shows.

Featured Works:

Flirt (1995); The Book of Life (1998); Meanwhile (2012, pictured)

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Evenings with Hal Hartley