Cinephile Bliss
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The Museum of Modern Art could relaunch its film programming in a Staten Island Burger King and still draw a crowd. As it happens, a nice chunk of the millions lavished on the great renovation project went into the refurbishing of the Roy and Niuta Titus theaters, those epicenters of cinephile bliss nestled away from the hustle and bustle in the subcellar level of the museum.
One of the better venues in New York to see a movie before the overhaul, the theaters now boast comfy new seating, upgraded sound and projection equipment, and an all-you-can-eat popcorn trough in the lobby. Okay, maybe not the latter: You’ll still have to sneak in your snacks.
For opening day I suggest a triple-decker club sandwich, a box of power bars, and two gallons of water. For on Saturday, November 21, Titus 2 will host all 48,000-odd minutes of Andy Warhol’s “Empire.” Created in 1964, and rarely screened in its proper form (in 16mm, at a slightly reduced projection speed), this legendary provocation consists entirely of a fixed-camera “portrait” of the Empire State Building. The Midtown icon is the only inanimate superstar immortalized on Warhol celluloid.
To spend eight hours in the dark zoning out on “Empire” would be the hardcore way to celebrate the reopening of MoMA, but it’s only slightly less absurd than climbing through the fifth-floor crowds to get a first-day peek at “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Picasso’s ladies aren’t going anywhere. And stubborn as he may seem deep into hour five, Warhol’s stolid, upright bachelor is far the more delicate personage: “Empire” is a movement of light that aches to be sculpture, a flicker that dreams of substantiation. Poignant and perverse, Warhol’s brazen conceptual/perceptual coup is as emblematic of the modernist spirit as any object in the MoMA collection. By laying this monumentally weird slab of space-time at their very foundation, the museum acknowledges cinema as a bedrock of 20th-century Modernism.
More than one cinemaniac of my acquaintance has vowed to withstand “Empire” as long as humanely possible. Those less inclined to test the limits of eyes, mind, and rump may be excused to Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” counter programmed at Titus 1.
But the serious film lover may wish to skip both altogether, get a good night sleep, and prepare for “Premieres,” the inaugural film series that begins on Sunday. Like a first-rate film festival gradually unspooling over the course of 10 weeks, the program features local, U.S., and world premieres from some of the greatest filmmakers in the world. There are new shorts by Bela Tarr and Agnes Varda; features by Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Alexander Sokurov, and Theo Angelopoulos; restorations of classics by Fassbinder, Visconti, Kubrick, Renoir; avant-garde offerings by Ernie Gehr, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Abbas Kiarostami.
But that’s just the warm-up. Beginning next Wednesday, and running all the way to New Year’s Eve 2005, MoMA flexes its huge institutional muscles with “112 Years of Cinema,” a selection of one film or video from every year in the history of motion pictures. In December alone you can see works by Edison, Ford, Brakhage, and Spielberg. Cinephiles are going to be spending an unhealthy amount of time up on 53rd street.
And then there is the matter of the utterly brilliant, thoroughly bonkers, completely unclassifiable new brain buster from Jean-Luc Godard. With a run time of 85 minutes, “Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinema” is enough to keep a cinephile occupied for an entire lifetime.As the title indicates, this 35mm film is an edit of Mr. Godard’s nearly five-hour long video essay “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” a notoriously difficult, famously beautiful masterwork considered by many (this critic included) to be the crowning achievement of the master’s late phase.
“A ruminative and exhilarating elegy to cinema and the twentieth century” is how MoMA describes “Moments Choisis,” noting that the inclusion of new material makes for “more than a summation” of the magnum opus. That’s a nice way to describe one of the most baffling combinations of sound and image you’ll ever encounter in a lifetime of movie going, and a nicer way to say that this companion piece is no glorified table of contents. Another admirer put it differently. “Fantastic!” he enthused after stumbling out of the intolerably early press screening, “it’s like “Histoire(s) du Cinema For Dummies!”
A dummy being primed on “Histoire(s)” would nevertheless profit from this minimum set of skills: absolute mastery of the French language; encyclopedic knowledge of world cinema, Western painting, European literature, and 20th-century classical music; more than passing familiarity with the most advanced forms and theories of montage; the capacity to retain and process an audio-visual onslaught of unprecedented complexity; deep schooling in the writings of Bazin, the mise-en-scene of Hitchcock, and the entire Godard oeuvre.
I’ve heard a lot of grumbling that the films of the late period, with their jags of atonal music, epigrammatic pronouncements, and worship of the Euro-modernist tradition, have become desiccated “museum pieces.” In one sense, the philistine reproach is correct. Godard’s great work finds an ideal home in MoMA. “Histoire(s)”is the other “Persistence Of Memory” in the collection, another “Dance” and “Dream,” a different take on “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.” Yes, it is where it belongs: pride of place among the landmarks of 20th century art.