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MoMA LAUNCHES NEW FILM EXHIBITION FROM THE COLLECTION FEATURING CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS Titles Spotlight Some of Cinema’s Most Dynamic and Productive Partnerships Collaborations in the Collection Beginning December 1, 2007 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters NEW YORK, November 21, 2007—The Museum of Modern Art presents Collaborations in the Collection, a new ongoing series of films that samples a wide range of classic and contemporary film collaborations, both well-known and rarely noticed. Launching on December 1, 2007, Collaborations in the Collection will draw on the 22,000 titles in the Museum’s collection to highlight collaborative relationships in cinema that have forged dynamic and memorable films. Taking into account all roles in film production, including screenwriting, producing, editing, cinematography, and music composition, titles in the series, when presented together, provide filmgoers the opportunity to view them in a different light. The exhibition is organized by Jenny He, Research Assistant, Department of Film. The opening selections represent an assortment of collaborative relationships: director Ernst Lubitsch with screenwriter Samson Raphaelson on The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a classic romantic comedy; director Wong Kar-Wai with cinematographer Christopher Doyle on Fallen Angels (1995), a tale of Hong Kong after dark; director Josef von Sternberg with actress Marlene Dietrich on Morocco (1930), the Mogador-set romantic drama that made the actress a household name in the U.S.; and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur who collaborated on the taut Brontë adaptation Wuthering Heights (1939). These films will be screened in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from December 1 to 21 and future selections will include director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s The Aviator (2004), actors Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell’s Seventh Heaven (1927), and director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). “Though each member of the filmmaking team has a specific job, no one works in a vacuum,” says Ms. He. “Their collaborative efforts combine to produce the final film, and this reciprocity in the creative process often produces singular works.” Images are available at www.moma.org/press No. 118 Press Contact: Paul Power, (212) 708-9847, or [email protected] For downloadable images, please visit www.moma.org/press Please contact me for user name and password. Public Information: The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019 Hours: Wednesday through Monday: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Friday: 10:30 a.m.-8:00 p.m. Closed Tuesday Museum Adm: $20 adults; $16 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D.; $12 full-time students with current I.D. Free, members and children 16 and under. (Includes admittance to Museum galleries and film programs) Target Free Friday Nights 4:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. Film Adm: $10 adults; $8 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $6 full-time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only) Subway: E or V train to Fifth Avenue/53rd Street Bus: On Fifth Avenue, take the M1, M2, M3, M4, or M5 to 53rd Street. On Sixth Avenue, take the M5, M6, or M7 to 53rd Street. Or take the M57 and M50 crosstown buses on 57th and 50th Streets. The public may call (212) 708-9400 for detailed Museum information. Visit us at www.moma.org COLLABORATIONS IN THE COLLECTION SCREENING SCHEDULE Saturday, December 1 2:00 The Smiling Lieutenant. 1931. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda, based on the operetta Ein Walzertraum by Leopold Jacobson and Felix Dörmann, and on the novel Nux der Prinzgemahl by Hans Müller. With Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins. This vintage Lubitsch romantic comedy features a love triangle between a Viennese lieutenant, his worldly violinist girlfriend, and a naïve princess smitten with the soldier. The Smiling Lieutenant, Raphaelson’s first screenplay and one of Lubitsch’s first sound films, was the debut collaboration between the writer and director. The pair would work together steadily until 1948, when Raphaelson virtually stopped writing for film. This is also Hopkins’s first film with Lubitsch—who would cast her again in Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933)—and one of five films that the director made with Chevalier. The Museum’s print, acquired from the Danish Filmmuseum, features Danish subtitles. 83 min. 4:00 Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed). 1932. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda, based on the play L’Homme que J’ai Tué by Maurice Rostand. With Lionel Barrymore, Phillips Holmes, Nancy Carroll. In one of Lubitsch’s grand indictments of historical ills, a French soldier seeks out the family of a German soldier he killed during the Great War, only to fall in love with the man’s fiancée. Another collaboration between Lubitsch and Raphaelson, Broken Lullaby is also the second screenwriting collaboration between Raphaelson and Vajda. Their third and final collaboration together, also with Lubitsch, was The Merry Widow (1934). 75 min. 6:00 Trouble in Paradise. 1932. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on the play The Honest Finder by Aladar Laszlo. With Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall. This love triangle story begins in Venice, where two sophisticated con artists (Hopkins and Marshall) meet their match in one another, and winds up in Paris, where the pair target a wealthy heiress (Francis). The refined Marshall seduces the beautiful widow as part of the scam, but there’s trouble in paradise when jealousy rears its none-too-subtle head. This is the third Lubitsch-Raphaelson collaboration released in 1932, following Broken Lullaby and One Hour with You. Acquired from Paramount Pictures. Preserved with funding from the Richard Griffith Memorial Fund. 81 min. Sunday, December 2 2:00 Duo luo tian shi (Fallen Angels). 1995. Hong Kong. Written and directed by Wong Kar- Wai. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. With Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro. This darkly humorous parallel-narrative film focuses on two characters—one a professional killer, the other a freewheeling mute man—and the eccentrics they encounter as they navigate Wong and Doyle’s Hong Kong after dark, a stylistically frenetic world that is alternately cool and whimsical. Wong and Doyle began their collaboration in 1991 with Days of Being Wild, and their last film together was 2046 (2004). Of their work together, Doyle noted in The Observer in 2005 that “the journey has been wonderful.” Their efforts have produced a brilliant joint canon of films that feature signature recurring visuals (saturated colors, kinetic camera movements, uncommon camera angles, and close-ups) and themes (love and loss) that have evolved throughout their long collaboration. The director and cinematographer have described their technique together as organic and specific to their dispositions: “Our styles come from the way we work” (Wong). In Cantonese; English subtitles. Gift of Kino International. 96 min. 4:00 Cheun gwong tsa sit (Happy Together). 1997. Hong Kong. Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. With Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Chen Chang. Lai Yiu-Fai (Leung) and Ho Po-Wing (Cheung), two men begrudgingly and hopelessly in love with each other, leave Hong Kong for Buenos Aires. En route to Iguaçu Falls, they break up and go their separate ways. Lai, broke and unable to return home, gets a job as a doorman at a tango bar. Ho hustles to survive, then reappears in Lai’s life—but neither can reconcile being happy together. The film features a mélange of collaborations. In addition to the director/cinematographer partnership, Leung and Cheung are frequently cast in Wong’s films, often playing variations on the same characters: Leung embodies lonesome men eternally unconsummated, and Cheung embodies reckless men eternally seeking from without what he needs to find from within. Gift of Kino International. In Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish; English subtitles. 97 min. Thursday, December 6 6:00 The Smiling Lieutenant. See Saturday, December 1, 2:00 8:00 Trouble in Paradise. See Saturday, December 1, 6:00 Friday, December 7 6:00 Cheun gwong tsa sit (Happy Together). See Sunday, December 2, 4:00 8:30 Duo luo tian shi (Fallen Angels). See Sunday, December 2, 2:00 Saturday, December 8 2:00 Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God). 1972. West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. With Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro. The storied collaboration between Herzog and Kinski is peppered with sensational tales. Herzog threatened to kill his lead actor during the production of this film—the first of five that they would go on to make together. “Yeah. That’s all true. I wanted to kill him too” (Kinski). So began a frenzied chapter in the careers of both director and actor during the surge of new German cinema. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Kinski plays a monomaniacal conquistador hell-bent on finding El Dorado. After mutinying from Pizarro’s 1560 expedition in Peru, he leads his followers on a dizzying journey into insanity. Kinski’s hypnotic onscreen presence is pitch-perfect for Herzog’s tale of ambition, power, and madness. In German; English subtitles. 95 min. 4:00 Woyzeck. 1979. West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog, based on the play by Georg Büchner. With Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann. Kinski plays everyman Woyzeck, a soldier in a nineteenth-century garrison town who takes on odd jobs (including serving as a doctor’s guinea pig) to support his family. When he begins to suspect his wife of cuckolding him, he psychologically unravels, abetted by whispering voices—both without and within his own mind.