Monday Night Football Meets Its Match

In just three weeks, the Museum of Modern Art has turned Monday evenings into something for cinephiles to look forward to. The museum’s new series of screenings and panel discussions, Modern Mondays, focuses on exploring the work of avant-garde filmmakers. “The idea of Modern Mondays is to continue the conversation,” the recently named chief curator of MoMA’s department of film, Rajendra Roy, said. “That’s something that’s lost with cutting-edge work. People kind of leave the theater going, ‘What the heck was that?'”The opening salvo at Modern Mondays was a focus on the film work of Austria’s Michael Haneke. A screening of 1996’s “Funny Games,” which is far and away Mr. Haneke’s most disturbing film, was followed by an informal discussion that included the filmmaker himself. In the past, Mr. Haneke has said that he seeks in his meticulously crafted, profoundly troubling features to foment “provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.” In MoMA’s Titus I theater, the audience and artist engaged in a polite riot of post-screening speculation, accusation, and adulation that was provocative indeed.In the discussion, Mr. Haneke’s responses — delivered via translator and on occasion in the director’s heavily accented English — ranged from the inscrutable to the disarmingly straightforward. He quoted “High Noon” director and fellow Austrian Fred Zinnemann one moment, and then doggedly challenged his questioners not to generalize the next. Consensus never entered into it.“We certainly had some people who were frustrated,” Mr. Roy said. “But for me that’s all performance. It’s part of what Haneke is as an artist. What he wanted was a reaction and that’s what he got.” Indeed, the crowd leaving the debut Modern Mondays screening fairly hummed with discussion — rather than filing numbly to the exits, as is usually the effect of “Funny Games.” Many continued the dialogue at The Modern, the restaurant attached to MoMA. A similar result occurred after last week’s Modern Mondays screening, when guest documentarian Kevin Everson continued to field questions at the bar long after the film.Mr. Roy — who started out as a performance artist before switching to a career as a film programmer at the Guggenheim Museum, with later stints at the Mix Festival, the Hamptons Film Festival, and the Berlin Film Festival — took part of the inspiration for the Modern Mondays series from his own formative film going. His introduction to the field was Mo-MA’s now defunct Cineprobe — a series of stand-alone experimental filmmaker and film pairings. “Programs like Cineprobe gave me a foot in the door as a way of appreciating that type of filmmaking,” Mr. Roy said. “That’s really how I got my feet wet.”Cineprobe’s early programs, curated by Laurence Kardish and Adrienne Mancia, began in 1968 and were a who’s who of the silver screen’s avant garde. “These programs had absolutely packed houses the first year,” recalled Mr. Kardish, who retains his position as curator in MoMA’s department of film. “There was a tremendous interest in the avant garde at the time because there were very few other venues.”Cineprobe debuted with Jim McBride and L.M. Kit Carson’s paradigmatic mockumentary “David Holzman’s Diary.” Within two years, its rolling survey of what Mr. Kardish defined as “non-narrative works that explore the modality of film expression” had hosted evenings with the Kuchar Brothers, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Joyce Whelen, Storm De Hirsch, Hollis Frampton, and Gunvor and Robert Nelson, among others.Tonight’s offering will revisit the glory days of Cineprobe. The museum welcomes back Ernie Gehr, who will discuss his 1970 film “Serene Velocity” and 1991’s “Side/Walk/Shuttle.” Tagged with the critical subheading “Structural Film,” Mr. Gehr’s work boils down filmic expression to its most basic components and in doing so opens the receptive viewer to a visual and kinetic experience completely outside the realm of story-driven filmmaking. “Serene Velocity” is perhaps Mr. Gehr’s most hallucinatory and beautiful creation.A singular advantage tonight’s audience will have is that “Serene Velocity” will be screened in Mo-MA’s new 35 mm blowup of the 16 mm original. And lest anyone think that this evening’s presentation is a stroll down experimental film’s memory lane, Mr. Kardish is quick to point out that Mr. Gehr “is still very much making films and expanding our notion of cinema.” His “Panoramas of the Moving Image” is currently on view in the Titus theater’s lobby.Mr. Roy, meanwhile, seeks to expand our notion of a night out. The Modern Mondays series, he says, is an effort to infuse Mo-MA’s sometimes daunting film schedule with “a little more regularity of programming, in order to get people who are involved in creating and talking about culture into MoMA. I really want the museum to be a site for discussion and innovation, and that can only happen if you get really busy, really creative people in here.”Upcoming programs highlight a variety of work culled from ongoing MoMA series and offer standalone screenings like the November 19 showing of Ronald Bronstein’s remarkable homegrown New York City cinematic provocation, “Frownland.” The sole expectation a Modern-Monday regular needs to cultivate, Mr. Kardish says, is that “if you come to the Museum at 7 p.m. on a Monday, you will see something unusual, distinctive, and cutting-edge.”Mr. Roy adds: “You don’t have to do your homework. Just show up knowing that you’re going to be challenged by what you see, but that it will be a mind-opening experience. “

Monday Night Football Meets Its Match

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