soul food movies: MoMA: Rossellini & Kiarostami

Week before last, my first trip to New York City! Amazing. Great company, great theatre, great food, great galleries, great music, great city.

Last day I visited MoMA, the principal draw for me being a couple film-related shows. "Rossellini On Paper" was a collection of photos, posters and documents relating to the Rossellini Retrospective that recently played (how I wish that would come to Vancouver!).

Rossellini on Paper
November 15, 2006–May 7, 2007

Titus Theater 1 Lobby Gallery, T1
Titus Theater 2 Lobby Gallery, T2

This exhibition of posters, family photographs, and correspondence documenting the career of Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini draws from the collections of Martin Scorsese, Wesleyan University, and the Museum's Department of Film and Media. It surveys the graphic presentation of his work internationally, and provides a rare glimpse into his creative process and offscreen life. Rossellini on Paper is held in conjunction with the film exhibition Roberto Rossellini.

Here are a few of the posters;

Also, an installation by Abbas Kiarostami.

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker
March 1–May 28, 2007

The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor

Abbas Kiarostami's (Iranian, b. 1940) gallery installation Five (2004)—a canny and sublime work which will also be screened as a single theatrical projection during the retrospective of the artist's entire moving-image oeuvre—beautifully mines the potential of digital imagery and sound while playfully investigating the fluid limits of documentary art practice. Alternatively titled Five Dedicated to Ozu, the work was acquired by MoMA after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, and this is its first presentation in the U.S. as a media installation. This meditative work, which focuses on the ebb and flow of the tide at a beach, comprises five segments projected in a continuous and synchronized loop onto five separate partitions dividing the gallery space, with the audio component of each screen blending slightly together.

I'd love to tell you more about the installation, but my time is short. Here are a few (very poor) images...