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

Featured Works:

22 films

Program information:

Alain Tanner

Cinemateca Uruguaya       

The Sweet Subversion of Alain Tanner   

September 1-13, 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:

25 films

Program information:

Retrospective Margarethe von Trotta

Featured Works:

25 films

Program information:

Raúl Ruiz

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:

33 films

Program information:

Buster Keaton

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.

During his lifetime, Giuseppe De Santis's master student, Elio Petri, was far better received abroad than at home: the leading Italian intellectuals of the new left did not know what to make of his baroque-sardonic, Pop Art vision of Brecht's "theatre of the people"-even as Petri remained so close to them politically, as a scourge of the Christian Democrats. After his death, many of these writers confessed: we were wrong, we had blinders on; he was one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s.

Like De Santis, Elio Petri came from humble beginnings: born in Rome in 1929, he grew up as the son of a coppersmith in a working-class suburb. He was politicized early, joined the Communist Party and worked for their youth organization, wrote for L'unita and Gioventù nuova. After the Hungarian uprising, however, he kept his distance from all PCI organizations. During those years Petri also met De Santis, and handed him a wonderful piece of material, the story for Roma ore 11 (1952). He became De Santis's most important artistic collaborator and co-writer of the screenplays for Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (1953), Giorni d'amore (1954), Uomini e lupi (1957), La strada lunga un anno (1958) and La Garçonnière (1960). Petri also wrote scripts for other filmmakers such as Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Puccini, but as he said later, the man from whom he learned everything about cinema, and life, was Giuseppe De Santis.

As early as 1954, Elio Petri directed his first short documentary, Nasce un campione, but it took another seven years before he was able to complete his feature film debut, L'assassino (1961), with Marcello Mastroianni in the title role. The film indicated the direction in which Petri would develop-grim, penetrating considerations of society in genre form. Not that he necessarily wanted to go there: in his little-known masterpiece I giorni contati (1962), Petri used a very different aesthetic register-something like "existential realism". However, starting with his fourth film, the science fiction allegory La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965, again starring Mastroianni), Petri remained faithful to genre cinema.

This tendency reveals itself even in Petri's realistic narratives such as La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971), which he imbued with the fury and energetic mise-en-scène of his thrillers-Italy portrayed as a nightmare that made even the most seemingly paranoid fantasy seem like an exercise in cinema vérité. In Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970), a high-ranking police officer murders his lover and leaves behind a crime scene full of clues-with little doubt about the killer's identity-just to see if his colleagues will dare to accuse him. Gian Maria Volonte shines in both films; he was Petri's favorite actor next to Mastroianni.

In one of Petri's major works, the two actors appeared together: Todo modo (1976). Among the most radical Italian films of the decade, Todo modo was an allegory about the Gladio conspiracy, Gladio being the code name for a reputedly NATO-backed anti-communist organization with ties to the neo-fascist lodge P2. Petri obviously knew what he was talking about: The film was released just as this entire network of organized crime and fascist elements in the armed forces became publicly known. By this time, Petri had developed into a kind of public enemy; attempts were made to neutralize him and remove the film from Italian movie theaters. Before his untimely death in 1982, he was only able to direct one more feature film, the uncannily "soft" Buone notizie-and a television adaptation of Sartre's "Dirty Hands," Petri's reckoning with the legacy of Stalinism.

Featured Works:

Nasce un campione (1954); L'assassino (1961); I giorni contati (1962); La decima vittima (1965); A ciascuno il suo (1967); Un tranquillo posto di campagna (1969); Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970, pictured); La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971); La proprietà non è più un furto (1973); Todo modo (1976); Buone notizie (1979)

Program information:

Elio Petri

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

Featured Works:

Almost 50 film and TV works.

Program information:

Robert Altman

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

Since 2006, Hors Pistes has pursued its passion for diversity of forms in contemporary moving images. Screenings, performances, video installations, ephemeral Web images: the event offers an international selection of these forms. Hors Pistes exists to showcase visual works investigating the world we live in by challenging narrative forms and remapping the borders between film genres (fiction, documentary, essay...). Hors Pistes takes place in the cinemas of the Centre Pompidou as well as its exhibition space on the lower floor. The cinemas offer a deliberately eclectic selection of recent films (section 1), while the exhibition space centers each year on a new theme relative to visual representation (section 2).

Program information:

Hors Pistes 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

Films are collective achievements. In this month's Magical History Tour we are showing films that highlight this collective work. This includes films made by groups that are only loosely connected to each other, as well as by collectives that reject the idea of individual authorship. These film collectives, which mostly emerged from political and social movements, wanted to create an anti-discourse with their work. They wanted to breach hierarchies and authorities and use film as a means of education and agitation, open to as many people as possible, especially those without power. The plurality of voices also plays an aesthetic role and is reflected in the enjoyment taken from experimentation and disparate forms. An incomplete insight into collective filmmaking is provided by films which date from the 1920s (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor) to today.

During the political events that took place in 1968 and the big workers' strikes in France, workers themselves took hold of the camera. We are showing a program with films by the Besançon and Sochaux Medvedkine workers' collectives: Nouvelle société N°5, 6, 7 (1969-70), Sochaux 11 juin 68 (1970), Les Trois Quarts de la vie (1971). Rhodia 4x8 (1969) is a "music video" for the class struggle. Scène de grève en Vendée (Paul Bourron, 1973) shows female workers on strike. Away from the conveyor belts and the obligation to clock in and out, they discover that they can talk and sing with each other.

The Black Audio Film Collective, which was founded in 1982 and existed until 1998, was an important voice in the debate on representation policy that took place in 1980s Britain. Its documentaries combined politics with the enjoyment taken from experimenting with form. Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986) is a multi-voice film essay that came out of the 1985 riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and London. A mosaic of images, sounds, archive material, footage of the riots and old family photos results in a multi-perspective collage.

Featured Works:

Nowy Wawilon (The New Babylon, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1929); Deux Fois (Jackie Raynal, 1968, pictured); Nouvelle société N°5 (Groupe Medvedkine 1969); Nouvelle société N°6 (Groupe Medvedkine 1969/70); Rhodia 4x8 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1969); Nouvelle société N°7 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1970); Sochaux 11 juin 68 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1970); Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970-1971); Femminista di Cinema, 1971); L'aggettivo donna (Rony Daopoulos and Annabella Miscuglio, with the Collettivo Femminista di Cinema, 1971); Les Trois Quarts de la vie (Groupe Medvedkine, 1971); Scène de grève en Vendée (Paul Bourron, 1973); Züri brännt (Zurich Is Burning, 1980-1981); Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986); Killer.berlin.doc (Bettina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitmann, 1999); A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (Esther B. Robinson, 2007)

Program information:

Cinema in the Plural: Collectives, Groups and Factories

Featured Works:

A full retrospective of one of the pioneers within contemporary American cinema.

Program information:

David Lynch: A Reputation Precedes...

On the occasion of its 10th retrospective, Metropolis teams up for the first time with the Sweden Embassy in Syria and the Swedish Institute to pay tribute to the famous director Ingmar Bergman.

Featured Works:

Thirteen of his most acclaimed features will be screened at the Metropolis Empire Sofil Theater from the 2nd to the 12th of February 2012. The retrospective will open with Bergman's last opus, Saraband (nominated for the Best European Union Film, 2005 César Awards). Metropolis will also have the pleasure to present his greatest films, among which are Autumn Sonata (Best Foreign Language Film, 1979 Golden Globes), Fanny and Alexander (Best Foreign Film, 1984 Golden Globes, pictured), and Wild Strawberries (Golden Bear, 1958 Berlin International Film Festival) starring Victor Sjöström, a pioneer of the Swedish cinema.

Program information:

Winter Light-A Retrospective of Ingmar Bergman

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

Featured Works:

Mr. Orchid (1946); The Battle of the Rails (1946); Les maudits (1947); The Walls of Malapaga (1949); The Glass Castle (1950); Forbidden Games (1952, pictured); Lovers, Happy Lovers! (1954); Gervaise (1956); Purple Noon (1960); Che gioia vivere (1961); The Day and the Hour (1963); Joy House (1964); Rider on the Rain (1970); And Hope to Die (1972); Scar Tissue (1975)

Program information:

Rétrospective René Clément

Barbara Hammer (born 1939) is a pivotal figure in American experimental film. An acclaimed pioneer of queer cinema, her prolific output includes the earliest avant-garde films that openly address lesbian life and sexuality. Her work remains of fundamental importance for a new generation of artists exploring new voices and new modes of experimenting with the moving image.

This major survey of Hammer's work will be launched with the premiere of her new short film, Maya Deren's Sink 2011, a tribute to Deren's longstanding influence on the artist. The month-long series also includes screenings of early, rarely seen Super-8 films, an evening of expanded cinema performances in the Turbine Hall, an event in response to Hammer's work by artist Emily Roysdon, and several events featuring artists and speakers drawn from across Europe and North America, who testify to the powerful creative community Hammer has inspired.

The programme will be punctuated with films by friends, colleagues, and filmmakers whom Hammer considers crucial influences. In addition to Deren, artists include Chick Strand, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gunvor Nelson, Chris Welsby, Gina Carducci, Cecilia Dougherty, John Greyson, William E. Jones, Liz Rosenfeld, Emily Mode, Scott Berry, Kirstin Rossi and more.

Hammer says: "As an experimental filmmaker and lesbian feminist, I have advocated that radical content deserves radical form." She has fearlessly pursued innovation from her earliest experiments with sexuality and feminist identity in the 1960s and '70s to her stunning perceptual and optical printing experiments during the '80s and the documentaries she continues to make that unearth secret histories and give voice to those traditionally without one. Her films have transformed the screen into an active and experimental field that powerfully brings together images and the bodies they represent.

Curated by Barbara Hammer and Stuart Comer.

Featured Works:

19 programs

Program information:

Barbara Hammer: The Fearless Frame

Featured Works:

The Story of Sue San (King Hu, 1964); Sons of the Good Earth (King Hu, 1965); Come Drink with Me (King Hu, 1966); Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967); A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971, pictured); The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 1973); Zhong lie tu (King Hu, 1975); Legend of the Mountain (director's cut, King Hu, 1979); Raining in the Mountain (King Hu, 1979); Tian xia di yi (King Hu, 1983); The Swordsman (King Hu, 1990); Hua pi zhi: Yin yang fa wang (King Hu, 1993); King Hu (Hubert Niogret, 2011)

Program information:

King Hu

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

The Retrospective of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival has rediscovered a legendary German-Russian film studio: Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch Prometheus wrote film history from 1922 to 1936.

Moisei Aleinikov, a Russian film expert and producer from tsarist times who had a great instinct for the right topics, and Willi Münzenberg, a German communist and "red media entrepreneur," joined forces in 1922 to combine clever business ideas, a political mission and boundless enthusiasm for new cinematic narratives. And so the film studio Mezhrabpom-Rus (later called Mezhrabpom-Film), a unique German-Russian film venture, was set up in Moscow, with headquarters in Berlin.

After producing some 600 films, this international experiment was brutally ended eleven and fourteen years later by Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

Featured Works:

Entitled "The Red Dream Factory", the Retrospective of the 2012 Berlinale will be dedicated to this studio rediscovered in Russian archives.

The Retrospective will present some 30 programs made up of over 40 silent and sound films. The silent films will all be accompanied by live music performed by renowned artists. The program includes diverse German premieres of films that are being made available by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk.

The film program will be accompanied by discussions and events at the Deutsche Kinemathek. Berlin's Bertz + Fischer will also be publishing a book for the Retrospective. In it, German and Russian authors will illuminate the development of the studio and the aesthetics of the films that were produced there.

In cooperation with Arte/ZDF, the Berlinale presents Sergei Eisenstein's classic Oktjabr (October, 1928). The film about the revolution in October of 1917 has written film history, particularly due to its crowd scenes. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra will accompany the screening on February 10th, 2012, at the Friedrichstadt-Palast with the original, reconstructed soundtrack by composer Edmund Meisel.

Program information:

Retrospective 2012: The Red Dream Factory

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

Program information:

Planète Manga !

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

Featured Works:

Let Us Do a Dream (1936); The Story of a Cheat (1936); Désiré (1937); Quadrille (1938, pictured); Le comédien (1948); The Lame Devil (1948); Aux deux colombes (1949); Poison (1951)

Program information:

Sacha Guitry

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.

Program information:

In person: Michael Snow