MoMA Launches Two-Year “Auteurist History of Film” Series

A scene from D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation."

The Museum of Modern Art has unveiled an ambitious new program that celebrates the director as the primary force behind the collaborative creation of film. “An Auteurist History of Film”, a two-year series of films drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection that will explore “the dawn of the cinematic art form.” Intended to serve as “both an exploration of the richness of the Museum’s collection” and as a basic introduction to “the development of cinema as a predominant art form of the 20th century,” the series will begin September 9.

The first three months of the series will explore pre-cinema; the earliest films seen in Europe and America, by the Edison Company and the Lumiere Brothers; pre-D.W. Griffith directors and the early efforts of Griffith at New York’s Biograph Studio; the innovations by Scandinavian filmmakers; and Griffith’s departure from Biograph. Over the course of the two-year series, explicatory and supplementary information will be available on MoMA’s website. The series is organized by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

“The auteurist approach to film, articulated by the critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s and brought to America by film writer and critic Andrew Sarris, contends that, despite the collaborative nature of the medium, the director is the primary force behind the creation of a film,” MoMA describes about the approach to the series in a statement.  “In the present context, this ‘theory’ is intended as a useful tool, not to be applied too rigidly or in a doctrinaire manner.  Rather than creating a single, formal museum canon, An Auteurist History of Film will provide filmgoers with a rare opportunity to follow the course of filmmaking from its origins to the present day by examining the role of the director.”

-For a complete list of screenings up to the end of November, with descriptions provided by MoMA, please continue to the following pages-

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