The Old Place. 1999. Switzerland/USA. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 48 min.
At the turn of the new millennium, MoMA commissioned Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville to make a film about the Museum, its collection, and its history. Working with video and archival material (as only they could), Godard and Miéville created a polemic on memory and memorialization through art, language, and, above all, the movies. The Old Place teems with visual and verbal puns; its subtitle, “Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall [sic] of the 20th Century,” alludes as much to Godard in the autumn of his life as it does to the historical forces that have shaped movements in art and cinema. The inseparable acts of looking at art and regarding the pain of others became fundamental to Godard’s politics of imagemaking, something he would continue to interrogate until his death with films like Notre musique (2004) and The Image Book (2018).
D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Shorts, 1908–12
The following films are all silent with recorded scores.
Those Awful Hats. 1909. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. With Mack Sennett, Flora Finch. DCP. 3 min
Romance of a Jewess. 1908. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. With Florence Lawrence, George Gebhardt, Gladys Egan. DCP. 13 min.
Father Gets in the Game. 1908. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. With Mack Sennett. DCP. 8 min.
An Awful Moment. 1908. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. With George Gebhardt. DCP. 12 min.
All films preserved by the Film Preservation Society.
The Musketeers of Pig Alley. 1912. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. With Lillian Gish, Elmer Booth. DCP. 16 min.
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with funding from The Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation.
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s reflections on D. W. Griffith in The Old Place, from his pioneering development of film language and his politics to his crucial place in the history of MoMA’s own film collection, we present several shorts that Griffith made for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913. Whether in the canon or unseen for more than a century, these films have achieved an unprecedented visual clarity and coherence thanks to contemporary digital technologies and painstaking research by Tracey Goessel, Ruxandra Blaga, and Benjamin Solovey of the Film Preservation Society, as well as MoMA conservator Peter Williamson and other experts in the field. The films in this selection, which have been digitally restored using 35mm materials preserved by MoMA, the Library of Congress paper print collection, and other sources, allow us to trace Griffith’s experiments in visual storytelling: the melodrama Romance of a Jewess (1908), shot on location on New York’s Lower East Side; the suspenseful An Awful Moment (1908); the proto-Keystone comedy Father Gets in the Game (1908), starring Mack Sennett in his first-ever lead appearance; the trick film Those Awful Hats (1909), a spoof of nickelodeon moviegoing; and the seminal gangster film The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912).
Program approx. 101 min.