At the Museum
Goings-on at Museum of the Moving Image
Beavers is a uniquely formal lyricist, and his films typically consist of the rhythmic analysis of a narrow band of content, spiraling out from a core of significant people or objects to examine their immediate environment.
During the first days of the 2020 lockdown, when New Yorkers saw time opening out abyssally before them and for filmmakers any kind of large-scale production was impossible, Artemis Shaw found her old camcorder in her parents’ apartment.
Romvari and Xu are compassionate image-seekers, yet they also subtly interrogate the systems surrounding their subjects.
The documentary functions as a living archive, a collection of 20 films made between 1964 and 1982 reporting, commenting, and philosophizing on the Palestinian struggle.
Amidst this beautiful and mysterious backdrop, sequences occur at random without explanation and do not always add up to a broader narrative. But much of its strength lies in the fact that very little happens and even less seems to connote meaning in the way we’re used to in cinema.
In her loosely structured, sensorial documentary, Long maps this history out along the San Andreas Fault, which splinters the state from north to south, capturing the textures and colors of the mountainous valley on gorgeously grainy 16mm.
Nominally, A Common Sequence is a documentary, though, threading together meditations on colonialism, environmental degradation, capitalism, labor and immigration, machine learning and AI, DNA harvesting and genomic manipulation, the film adopts a nonlinear, almost impressionistic approach.
Abrahams frequently shifts aesthetic registers, from stylized vignettes to handheld observation, introspective narration to candid conversation, the heightened past to the quotidian present. Abrahams has explained that she wanted to evoke sense-memory, as if inviting the viewer into her own state of mind.
Herbaria offers audiences a unique meditation on extinction and preservation in the twinned worlds of plants and film. Shot on 35mm and 16mm, this mysterious, at times cryptic, essayistic work takes viewers to two locations: the seemingly disparate Buenos Aires Botanical Garden and the Museo del Cine.
The ghost of Bogart hovers over two films from the 1970s that are screening in the Snubbed series, selections that exemplify the Academy’s indifference to unlikable antiheroes adrift in diffuse underworlds.
Tsuchimoto made more than a dozen more films about Minamata, which reflects a level of personal dedication unrivaled by most other documentarians. He also made films about student revolts, the plight of the average fisherman, Siberia, and Afghanistan.
Translating Poe to a visual medium is an inherently tricky endeavor: though the plots of his stories lend themselves to film, the everlasting poignancy of his work is his deft use of language to conjure moods of ominous ineffability.
That tension that Caan carries merely by being on-screen might be best exemplified in The Gambler, the 1974 film directed by Karel Reisz from a James Toback script. It follows Caan as Axel Freed, a clever Harvard-educated literature professor and gambling addict from a well-to-do New York Jewish family.
An appreciation of George A. Romero's beloved, decades-spanning horror epic, in conjunction with MoMI's screening series Films of the Dead: Romero & Co., June 25–July 30.
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