March 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

March 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

Today we recap screenings, events, and celebrations from March related to GME titles, artists, and colleagues. Notably, GME celebrated Women’s History Month by spotlighting works by women filmmakers that we distribute on DSL, DVD, and Blu-Ray. In the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, GME streamed Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES (which Mancia wrote about at length in Film Comment) and featured a number of rare archival treasures from Mancia's papers. Additionally, MIX NYC publicly shared the filmed Q&A session from their festival's closing night program in November 2024, which featured remarks from GME President Jon Gartenberg, commenting on GME associate Matt McKinzie's film and the other films in the program. At the end of the month, Gartenberg contributed program notes for Abigail Child's screening of her film THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers' Cooperative.

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Watch an Excerpt from the Closing Night Q&A at MIX Fest 2024, Featuring GME President Jon Gartenberg and GME Associate Matt McKinzie

Watch an Excerpt from the Closing Night Q&A at MIX Fest 2024, Featuring GME President Jon Gartenberg and GME Associate Matt McKinzie

On November 23rd, 2024, QUEER DREAM TRIPTYCH, a found footage poem film by GME associate Matt McKinzie, screened at the Quad Cinema in the closing night program of MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. The post-screening Q&A session with the filmmakers involved rich, cross-generational discourse pertaining to depictions of pleasure versus depictions of trauma, as related to queer identity and sexuality, in the selected films. This Q&A session was filmed and made available to the public on March 21st. GME President Jon Gartenberg, in attendance that evening with GME Fine Arts Curator David Deitch, commended the filmmakers for “externalizing their interior struggles on the screen,” praising their willingness to be “vulnerable” in their work and remarking that he found this kind of filmmaking — wherein the artists confronted their trauma in their art — to be “new and refreshing.”

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Read Jon Gartenberg's Program Note for Abigail Child's THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

Read Jon Gartenberg's Program Note for Abigail Child's THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

On Friday, March 28th, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child presented her feature-length cinematic triptych THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, of which she is a longtime member. THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY is comprised of three films Child created over the span of a decade: CAKE AND STEAK (2004), THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU (2004), and SURF AND TURF (2008—11). Child describes the trilogy as “prismatic” and being “about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post-WWII North American suburbs and… the war in Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation.” GME President Jon Gartenberg is a longtime friend and collaborator of Child’s and has programmed her work at film festivals internationally, including THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY, which was screened at the Pesaro Film Festival. Gartenberg contributed the program note for this screening at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which can be read here.

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Francis Ford Coppola's DEMENTIA 13

Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Francis Ford Coppola's DEMENTIA 13

As a programmer at The Museum of Modern Art, Adrienne Mancia was an advocate of progressive “New Hollywood” filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola who, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, subverted the moral and aesthetic traditions (and limitations) of the studio system by producing thematically and stylistically challenging work influenced by European cinema, the American avant-garde, and the countercultural ethos of the era at large. This month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, GME presents Coppola’s debut feature film DEMENTIA 13 (1963), which screened in MoMA’s November—December 2023 tribute to Mancia.

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Warren Sonbert's HALL OF MIRRORS Screens at New Music Circle on January 18th

Warren Sonbert's HALL OF MIRRORS Screens at New Music Circle on January 18th

On Saturday, January 18th, at 7pm, Missouri’s New Music Circle will screen Warren Sonbert’s third film, HALL OF MIRRORS (1966), in a program of experimental films that were made in the first decade of the organization’s existence (1959—1969). GME is the custodian of Sonbert’s legacy, and since his passing has worked on an extensive project to preserve, distribute, and curate career retrospectives of his films on an international basis, as well as publish original documents from the paper archive of his writings. HALL OF MIRRORS is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert’s film classes at NYU taught by Carl Lerner, the editor of such Hollywood features as 12 ANGRY MEN (1957) and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT (1962). Sonbert was provided with outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence.

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Women Filmmakers

Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Women Filmmakers

Adrienne Mancia was a fearless advocate and personal friend of innumerable women directors who pioneered new and challenging forms of filmmaking throughout the 20th century. This selection of short films, curated by the GME team, highlights the work of groundbreaking women filmmakers Maya Deren, Faith Hubley, Agnès Varda, and Shirley Clarke that Adrienne programmed and championed throughout her career. To view this program in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, click here.

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Hou Hsiao-Hsien's THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI Screens at New York's Asia Society and Museum on January 8th

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI Screens at New York's Asia Society and Museum on January 8th

Tonight, January 8th, at 6:30pm, an imported 35mm print of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983) will screen at New York’s Asia Society and Museum as part of Films To See Before You Die, an ongoing monthly series featuring “classic films and underseen gems from across Asia and the Asian diaspora with extended introductions by Asia Society's Curator of Film.” GME distributes THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI in the collection HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: EARLY WORKS, which also features the filmmaker’s earlier features CUTE GIRL (1980) and THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME (1982). The collection is available to North American academic institutions as a DVD published by Cinematek, which includes three audiovisual essays by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López as bonus features, and is accompanied by a multi-lingual booklet by Tom Paulus.

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Celebrate Short Film Day with GME's Program of Holiday Shorts in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room

Celebrate Short Film Day with GME's Program of Holiday Shorts in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room

Today, December 21st, is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and has therefore been declared Short Film Day in Germany. December 28th is also recognized as Short Film Day in the United States, in honor of the Lumière brothers’ first public screening of moving pictures (all of which were shorts) at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28th, 1895. Celebrate Short Film Day this year by visiting the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, where a program of holiday-themed shorts, curated by the GME team, is now available to view.

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