MoMA Announces a Retrospective of French Director Jacques Tati

The Museum of Modern Art presents a 10-film retrospective of the French screenwriter, director, and actor Jacques Tati

(born Jacques Tatischeff, 1907-1982), in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from December 18, 2009, through January 2, 2010. Jacques Tati features newly struck 35mm prints of his six feature films, including beautiful restorations of M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967); his long-dreamed-of colorized version of Jour de fête (1949), the revelatory Traffic (1971), and the little-seen Parade (1974); as well as three short sketch comedies. Complementing these is Claude Autant-Lara’s rarely screened wartime fantasy Sylvie et le fantôme (1945), in which Tati gives a charmingly spectral performance. The retrospective is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

One of cinema’s greatest comedians, Tati was also one of its most radical modernists. As a director, his experiments with sound, color, and image, and with language, design, and technology, are a fundamental, if often overlooked, bridge between the innovations of Buster Keaton and Max Linder in the silent era, those of his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson, and filmmakers today who owe much to his style and humor, from Roy Andersson to Wes Anderson, Otar Iosseliani to Elia Suleiman, Takeshi Kitano to Sylvain Chomet.

Tim Burton Retrospective

On November 22, the Museum of Modern Art will open “Tim Burton,” a retrospective for the man who, it goes without saying, has brought us some of the most fantastical movies of the last two decades, from Beetlejuice to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Rather than cobbling together a predictable slew of movie stills, the curators have assembled a sprawling show of films, photos, props, and puppets, as well as dozens of immaculate, beautiful, and sinister drawings the director has done throughout his life. Much of the work has been stored in his London home for years. MoMA “contacted me and it forced me to open it up and look at everything,” Burton recently told New York. “It's like opening up an old closet or something — like ‘Oh! What's all this crap?’”

Get a Move On

If you want to be moved and you're visiting or live in New York, I suggest you spend some kinetic time tomorrow at "Moving Pictures: A Symposium of Illustration and Motion." Moderator and organizer Lauren Redniss reveals a history of blind spots; Jody Rosen unveils “The Knowledge” of London taxi drivers (the "it" that every London cabbie must know); Joel Smith, a Saul Steinberg scholar, maps the artist's mind; NYPL artist-in-residence Richard McGuire screens the film Fear(s) of the Dark .

The event is FREE and open to the public at The New School Jazz Performance Space Arnhold Hall. It's tomorrow, November 11, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., at 55 West 13th Street, 5th floor, New York City.

via: The Daily Heller

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed".

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s.

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

Cut Off

Slash: Paper Under the Knife is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series,

which examines the renaissance of traditional handicraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

How Film Titles Have Evolved

Before the cinematic title sequences of today’s films, pioneered by the likes of Saul Bass and (more recently) Kyle Cooper, film titles were once a motionless work of art. In this ‘Now and then,’ we are pressing pause and exploring the art behind the film title.

Since the early days of cinema, artists have carefully designed film titles to captivate audiences and set the film’s mood. To bring attention to this often overlooked art form, Dutch graphic designer (and movie lover) Christine Annyas has put together . The Movie Stills Collection The website collects and neatly organizes film titles by decade, from the 1920’s to present. To illustrate how film titles have evolved over the years, we've chosen some of our favorites from the collection.

Continue here: idsgn.org