Events

Saturday Sessions: Hosted by Molly Surno of Cinema 16 featuring Five Classic Avant-Garde Films with live accompaniment by FORMA

Saturday, April 16, 2011
3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Hans Ritcher's Vormittagsspuk
(Ghosts Before Breakfast), 1928

Rocky Luten: Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1923)
Photo: Brett Messenger

George Bennett
Photo: Brett Messenger

Mark Dwinell
Photo: Brett Messenger

Molly Surno of Cinema 16 hosts an afternoon with the synth trio FORMA, transforming five classic experimental short films with original, live accompaniment. Drawing from the iconography and romanticism of Surrealism, this event will feature works by the pioneers of the avant-garde, including Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1923), Maya Deren's At Land (1944), Hans Ritcher's Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast) (1928), Shirley Clarke's Dances in the Sun (1953), and Scott Bartlett's Off/ON (1957).  

Molly Surno is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and founder and director of Cinema 16, which has been presented in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin. The program has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Filmmaker Magazine, NYLON, Time Out, Interview, and Vice. Surno's photographs have been exhibited at AIR Gallery, Heist, Capricious, and Brooklyn Botanical Garden, among others. She is currently working on an experimental film and photo series titled "The Glittering World," which examines the Miss Transgender Beauty Pageant in the American Southwest.

In a time when film viewing has been reduced to the tiny screens of our laptops and iPods, often in private settings, Cinema 16, revives the communal viewing experience and modernizes it using contemporary musicians. Named after the New York-based film society, which was founded in 1947, and inspired by Maya Deren's Greenwich Village presentations of experimental films, C/16 draws its format from the silent film era, when live music accompanied black-and-white, 16mm projections. Like vaudeville traditions before it, C/16 takes place in a variety of spaces and combines the worlds of art, film, and music.

Brooklyn-based, minimal synth trio FORMA (Mark Dwinell, Sophie Lam, George Bennett) blends the momentum of krautrock with the drones of early American Minimalist music to create cyclical, mutative soundscapes paired with live drum-machine programming. Working within the technological parameters of late 1970s and early 80s analog synthesizers, FORMA offers a contemporary response to the futuristic visions advanced by the pioneers of modern electronic music.

Saturday Sessions is a program of events designed to introduce wide-ranging directions in performance. The experimental program is structured around collaboration and focuses on engaging MoMA PS1 visitors in a unique, two-hour-long experience. Each session features a different host and will occur every other Saturday of the month in the Third Floor Main Gallery.    

**Ticketed Event: As capacity is limited, Saturday Sessions is a ticketed event. Tickets are free with admission and available only on a first-come, first-served basis. Beginning at 1:00 p.m., tickets will be released at the MoMA PS1 Information desk in the main lobby. Guests with tickets are only guaranteed entry from 2:30-3:00 p.m. Admittance to the gallery after the program begins will be based on capacity.  Guests will not be admitted to the gallery after 3:15pm.