Rare MoMA Prints to screen at the HIGH
High Museum presents “Modern Masters of Film,” a chance to see rare prints from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.
- Warhol
- Double Vision: Chelsea Girls
The High Museum of Art announced its first major film program since the passing of Linda Dubler: “Modern Masters of Film: From Edison to Scorsese,” a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the blockbuster exhibition “Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters,” offering “an opportunity to rediscover—or discover for the first time—historically important and wildly entertaining films from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.”
Prints from MoMA’s renowned film collection rarely screen outside the hallowed halls of the New York Museum itself, which makes this a noteworthy event by any standard.
The eleven screenings have been broken into two series—with the first installment of four films beginning on October 15 with the The Story of Temple Drake (1933), a controversial Pre-Code Southern Gothic tale of bootleggers and rape, featuring Miriam Hopkins.
October 22 brings Hells Hinge’s (1916), one of the finest early movie Westerns, co-directed by, and starring William S. Hart.
October 29 showcases ItalianAmerican (1974), one of Martin Scorsese’s first and finest documentary films, a family portrait shot in his parent’s Little Italy home, in which we learn where the director, a notorious chatterbox, developed his affection for storytelling.
On November 5, part one of the series concludes with a high point (no pun intended), Andy Warhol’s three-plus-hour dual-projected cinematic happening: The Chelsea Girls (1966), a unique crossover with the High’s exhibition, which features Warhol paintings. The movie showcases two films simultaneously projected side-by-side, with sound alternating at the discretion of the projectionist, single long-take sequences, some in black & white and others in color, some loosely scripted, others obviously (and sometimes badly) improvised, some kinetic with activity and others in the style of Warhol’s Screen Tests.
It is worth the price of admission for the “Pope Ondine” sequence alone, a prefect moment of divine cinematic inspiration, where poet Robert Olivo breaks down the lines of fiction and reality, performance and improvisation, art and entertainment.
Part 2 of the series begins in February 2012.
Shows for the series will screen at 8 p.m., with the museum adding 2 p.m. matinee shows (and a pricing scheme that includes museum admission.)
For complete information, visit: http://www.high.org/Programs/Programs/MoMA-Films.aspx