MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Exhibition Features Films from a Diversity of Genres ab... Page 1 of 12 EXHIBITION FEATURES FILMS FROM A DIVERSITY OF GENRES ABOUT WARS THAT NEVER TOOK PLACE For Immediate Release September 2000 The Imaginary War September 14–October 15, 2000 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters 1 and 2 The Imaginary War is an international selection of films about fictional wars that served as warnings or critiques of real wars. The exhibition includes a range of films, from Aelita (1924), Yakov Protazanov’s fantasy of a proletarian uprising on Mars, and the Marx Brothers’s anti- totalitarian burlesque Duck Soup (1933), to Stanley Kubrick’s atomic satire Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Barry Levinson’s prescient Wag the Dog (1997). The Imaginary War, part of The Museum of Modern Art’s Open Ends exhibition, is on view from September 14 to October 15, 2000. The program was organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video. The Imaginary War was inspired by a comment Jean-Luc Godard made about his 1963 film Les Carabiniers, an anti-war allegory that shatters all conventions of the genre by blending documentary actuality and fanciful invention: “In dealing with war, I followed a very simple rule. I assumed I had to explain to children not only what war is, but what all wars have been …rather as if I were illustrating the many—yet always drearily familiar—faces of war by projecting imagerie sheets through a magic lantern, in the manner of the early cameramen who used to fabricate newsreels.” The Imaginary War features a diversity of genres—science fiction and fantasy, slapstick comedy and the political thriller, pseudo-documentary and experimental and animation works. Through these various and imaginative forms, filmmakers have created fictional wars to reflect antiwar or jingoistic sentiments. Examples include the rise of the Nazis in Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933), and their aspirations to world domination in William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936); the Cold War in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), and Lewis Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice (1967); Korea in Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952); Vietnam in Ingmar Bergman’s Shame (1968); Grenada in Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986); and the Gulf War in Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997). The dangers of the nuclear age brought many films anticipating the end of the world. Among the most memorable and innovative were Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship XM (1950), Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953), Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1967). Colonialism and imperialism—American in particular—have provoked directors both at home and abroad as well. In the United States, http://www.moma.org/about_moma/press/2000/imag_war_10_09_00.html 2/2/2009 MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Exhibition Features Films from a Diversity of Genres ab... Page 2 of 12 Woody Allen in Bananas 1971) and Paul Verhoeven in Starship Troopers (1997); in Canada, Joyce Wieland in Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968); in Great Britain, Jack Arnold in The Mouse that Roared (1959) and Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1982); and in Australia, George Miller in Mad Max II: The Road Warrior(1981). Other films featured in the exhibition evoke the aftermath of military coups and the fate of resistance movements. These films included Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us(1960), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), René Laloux’s Savage Planet (1973), George Romero’s Code Name: Trixie (1973), Peter Lilienthal’s Calm Prevails over the Country(1976), and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988). SPONSORSHIP Open Ends 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, Mrs. Melville Wakeman Hall, Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Joann and Gifford Phillips, NEC Technologies, Inc., and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. Education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by BNP Paribas. The publication Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980 is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. The interactive environment of Open Ends is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Film and video programs during Open Ends are supported by The New York Times Company Foundation. Web/kiosk content management software is provided by SohoNet. The Imaginary War Screening Schedule: T1: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 T2: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2 Thursday, September 14, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, September 23, 2:30 p.m. T2 Breathdeath: A Trageede in Masks. 1964. USA. Directed by Stan VanDerBeek. Soundtrack by Jay Watt. Using the technique of collage animation, VanDerBeek compares modern man in a nuclear age with the vision of death portrayed in fifteenth-century woodcuts. Blending newsreel footage mocking social concerns about the end of the world with images of Hollywood and warfare, the film, VanDerBeek says, “superimposes Groucho Marx on a Karl Marx battlefield.” 15 min. Duck Soup. 1933. USA. Directed by Leo McCarey. Screenplay by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby. Additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin. Cinematography by Henry Sharp. With Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont. Duck Soup was such a flop when it opened in 1933 that Paramount dropped its contract with the Marx Bros. With the American economy in collapse, Hitler on the rise in Germany, and democracy faltering at home and abroad, audiences were simply not in the mood for a political satire that held nothing sacred and left nothing http://www.moma.org/about_moma/press/2000/imag_war_10_09_00.html 2/2/2009 MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Exhibition Features Films from a Diversity of Genres ab... Page 3 of 12 unscathed, particularly one in which a mythical country named Freedonia goes to war with neighboring Sylvania for the hell of it. Though Duck Soup was provocative enough to have been banned in Italy by Mussolini, Leo McCarey, its director, insisted that the only political message intended was “to kid dictators,” and Groucho confided that “We didn’t fight this war out of love for Freedonia, you know. We fought that war because we wanted to throw things.” 75 min. Friday, September 15, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, September 16, 2:30 p.m. T2 Interplanetary Revolution. 1924. USSR. Designed for the Animation Workshop by E. Komissarenko, Y. Merkulov, N. Khodatayev. Cinematography by V. Alexejev. In 1924 a production workshop for animated films was established at the State Film Technicum, and for the first time stop- motion animation (using puppets and flat drawings) was recognized as an effective tool of Soviet agitprop, particularly in celebration of the October Revolution and in promotion of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The first of the workshop’s productions was Interplanetary Revolution, a parody of the sensational utopian film-fantasy Aelita, directed earlier that year by Yakov Protazanov from Tolstoy’s 1923 best-seller about a proletarian revolution on Mars. 10 min. Aelita. 1924. USSR. Directed by Yakov Protazanov. Screenplay by Fyodor Otsep and Alexei Faiko, based on the novel by Alexei Tolstoy. Cinematography by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky and E. Schönemann. With Valentina Kuinzhi, Nikolai Tseretelli, Konstantin Eggert, Yulia Solntseva, Yuri Zavadsky. As J. Hoberman recounts in The Red Atlantis, “Aelita was the most publicized Soviet film before Potemkin concretized the revolution in 1925....A target for vanguard film critics and doctrinaire politicos alike, Aelita was attacked as too expensive, too Western, too bourgeois, and too convoluted, not to mention anti-Soviet and antiproletariat. After the establishment of ‘socialism in one’s country’ in 1931, space fantasy was no longer legal, and soon after, Aelita’s innocently Trotskyist fantasy of interplanetary solidarity was forbidden altogether.” English intertitles. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Ben Model (Sept. 15) and Stuart Oderman (Sept. 16). Approx. 80 min. Saturday, September 16, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, September 18, 3:00 p.m. T2 Things to Come. 1936. Great Britain. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Screenplay by H.G. Wells, based on his essay. Cinematography by George Perinal. With Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Maurice Braddell, Edward Chapman, Sophie Stewart. For all its purple prose and muddled idealism, Things to Come remains one of the truly inventive science-fiction film fantasies. H.G. Wells wrote the screenplay adaptation of his 1933 essay “The Shape of Things to Come,” a prophetic forecast of civilization’s collapse under fascism and totalitarianism. Although audiences at the time reportedly howled in disbelief at the prospect of bombers flying over the coast of England, the film’s shockingly realistic opening air raids on the London-like Everytown, Christmas Eve 1940, would come true soon enough. But after sweeping through a dark century of war, barbarism, and oppression, Things to Come opens onto a brave new world in the year 2036, when technology and scientific progress have eliminated disease and poverty and paved the way to freedom through air conditioning, high-tech telecommunications, and resplendent deco-futurist furnishings. 100 min. Sunday, September 17, 1:00p.m.