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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART MOUNTS FIVE-MONTH-LONG EXHIBITION EXPLORING RICHES FROM THE AGE OF SILENT FILMMAKING

Museum Presents Most Comprehensive Retrospective From Its International Collection of Silent Cinema In Film Component of MoMA2000's First Cycle, ModernStarts

From Automatic Vaudeville to the Seventh Art: Cinema's Silent Years, 1893-1928 October 7, 1999 - March 2000 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

In October 1999, The Museum of Modern Art launches MoMA2000, a museum- wide, seventeen-month-long series of exhibitions that explore the Museum’s unparalleled collection. The first cycle of the series, ModernStarts, focuses on the origins and early years of modern art from the late 1800s through the 1920s. As part of this examination of the beginnings of modernism, MoMA's Department of Film and Video will mount From Automatic Vaudeville to the Seventh Art: Cinema's Silent Years, 1893-1928, the most comprehensive survey of silent cinema ever presented from the Museum's collections. Running from October 7, 1999, through March 2000 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, the series spans the entire history of the medium from its earliest incarnation as a peepshow parlor attraction ("automatic vaudeville"), through the years of experimentation and consolidation (1908-1917), to its great maturity as an art form in the 1920s.

In concert with the organizing themes for ModernStarts--People, Places, Things--these films deal with issues of the human figure and gestural codes; landscape in early cinema, especially the Western; and the apparatus of early motion picture exhibition. In addition to film screenings, From Automatic Vaudeville to the Seventh Art features a number of special musical events and a series of lectures and presentations about early cinema.

"The Department of Film and Video is very excited to explore the breadth and depth of the Museum’s holdings in silent cinema in this extensive retrospective," says Steven Higgins, Curator, Department of Film and Video, who organized the exhibition. "Over the next five months, the public will have a rare opportunity to trace in detail the birth and growth of the twentieth century's most influential art form, from its beginnings; through the development of its visual language, genres, and stars; to the masterworks of feature-length narrative cinema of the 1910s and 1920s."

Among the series' highlights are many films the Museum has preserved in the last decade, including recently restored 35mm copies of previously unseen titles from MoMA's collection of works from the Edison and Biograph studios. Other restored prints to be screened in the series are The Nut (Theodore Reed, 1921), starring Douglas Fairbanks; John Ford's epic tale of the transcontinental railroad, The Iron Horse (1924); the Chaplin two-reeler The Floorwalker (1916); the Harold Lloyd comedy

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Grandma's Boy (Fred Newmeyer, 1922); and two landmarks of early American cinema by Edwin S. Porter, The Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is shown in a tinted and hand-colored print.

In addition, the series presents a number of programs focusing on the core strengths of the archive, among them works by D. W. Griffith (including three versions of his 1916 epic Intolerance), Douglas Fairbanks, Thomas H. Ince, , and William S. Hart; early Pathé subjects; and slapstick comedy. In January, a cycle of films entitled The American Place: Landscape in the Early Western will examine the development of the iconography of the West in motion pictures. The exhibition also features key international works of silent cinema from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Australia.

Special musical events include performances by pianist Christine Niehaus of original scores from the period, including Way Down East (Griffith, 1920) and Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927), as well as a newly commissioned edition of Louis F. Gottschalk's score for Griffith's 1919 Broken Blossoms, edited and introduced by musicologist Gillian Anderson. Most other screenings feature piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman or Ben Model.

A series of guest lecturers will provide insight into a variety of topics related to early cinema, including James Frasher on , Charles Musser on African-American cinema, Richard Abel on early French cinema, Patrick Loughney on early cinema in The Library of Congress, Ned Thanhouser on the Thanhouser Film Company, Victoria Franklin Dillon on Chester and Sidney Franklin, Paolo Cherchi Usai on color in early cinema, Richard Kozarski on silent filmmaking in , Herbert Reynolds on the important, but little-known, studio the Kalem Company, and Ronald S. Magliozzi on sheet music and silent film, among others. David Francis, Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at The Library of Congress, will make a special presentation of a magic lantern show, based upon the Museum's collections.

The Museum will also exhibit two new kinetoscopes, coin-operated viewing machines introduced in 1894 that were the earliest form of cinema exhibition in the United States. Built by historian Ray Phillips according to original Edison specifications, these two machines will exhibit new preservation prints of original Edison kinetoscope subjects-- the collection's earliest film holdings (1894-1896)--on a rotating basis. Finally, the Museum will publish from its collections a facsimile edition of W. K.-L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson's History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (1895), the first history of the cinema.

This exhibition is part of MoMA2000, which is made possible by The Starr Foundation. Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. The education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by Paribas. The publication ModernStarts: People, Places, Things is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

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No. 73

©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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