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A FEAST OF FILM
EPIC FILMMAKING AT ITS FINEST

A stunning visualization of melancholy & nostalgia
felt at the passing of an era

This weekend the Museum of the Moving Image will be holding screenings of the classic grande epic, The Leopard, as part of its See It Big! series. Long hailed as thee film to see by Luchino Visconti, The Leopard, chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s and the dissolution of 19th century Sicilian nobility.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the film is a remarkable cinematic achievement superbly illustrating a refined way of life; elaborate and luxurious, but internally cramped, dour, and confined by rigid restraints. Visconti translates di Lampedusa's book seamlessly with brilliant pictures, almost like paintings, illustrating the autumnal mood of change and decay that the onrush of social revolution brought to one family and to the spirits of one strong man. A more than 40 year old evocation of an era now some 150 years in the past, we can still feel the ache, sentiment, and sadness deeply felt by the Prince of Salina.

Screenings Saturday & Sunday 2pm

DEMI LUXE
INTERIOR DESIGN / SCOTT SANDERS

TIMELESS
CURIOSITIES

Park Avenue Armory presents Trisha Brown Dance Company’s reconstruction of Astral Converted, a groundbreaking work by acclaimed choreographer Trisha Brown. This highly anticipated revival marks the first time in 18 years the piece will be presented in its entirety in the soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

The re-staging of Astral Converted brings back collaborators, Robert Rauschenberg, visual and costume design, with original music by John Cage.  Astral's dark and cosmos like set  is anchored by Rauschenberg's motion sensored towers which activated by the dancers’ movements initiate the performance’s light and sound. The movement combines sudden bursts of gravity-defying plunges and crashes with fluid leaps and falls creating an unpredictable, understated, and powerful choreographic work. With moving bodies appearing as stars amid an illimitable darkness Astral Converted is the perfect performance piece for contemporary art fans with a bent for architecture or geometry.

This Sunday a reconstructed bit of animation rarely seen, tremendously entertaining, and historically significant will screen at BAM. The Adventures of Prince Achmed, by pioneering, avant-garde, and often overlooked German filmmaker and female artist Lotte Reiniger, employs silhouetted black cardboard cutouts on illuminated glass to craft this dreamlike homage to The Arabian Nights.

Developed using stop animation and originally released in 1926, this special closing day event, hosted by BAMcinemaFest,  has enlisted two founding members of the Irish ambient rock band 3epkano's and avant-garde cellist Erik Friedlander to arrange and perform a new score as they find their muse in the oldest surviving animated feature film to date.



More than eighty years later, what's most surprising about The Adventures of Prince Achmed is still how extraordinarily beautiful it is. Just as it must have been for viewers back in 1926. Film director, Jean Renoir, son of the famous painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, is said to have been an early admirer of the film and instrumental in facilitating its general European release as a work of rare artistry and fluid beauty.