MoMA LAUNCHES NEW FILM EXHIBITION FROM THE COLLECTION FEATURING CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS

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1 MoMA LAUNCHES NEW FILM EXHIBITION FROM THE COLLECTION FEATURING CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS Titles Spotlight Some of Cinema s Most Dynamic and Productive Partnerships Collaborations in the Collection Beginning December 1, 2007 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters NEW YORK, November 21, 2007 The Museum of Modern Art presents Collaborations in the Collection, a new ongoing series of films that samples a wide range of classic and contemporary film collaborations, both well-known and rarely noticed. Launching on December 1, 2007, Collaborations in the Collection will draw on the 22,000 titles in the Museum s collection to highlight collaborative relationships in cinema that have forged dynamic and memorable films. Taking into account all roles in film production, including screenwriting, producing, editing, cinematography, and music composition, titles in the series, when presented together, provide filmgoers the opportunity to view them in a different light. The exhibition is organized by Jenny He, Research Assistant, Department of Film. The opening selections represent an assortment of collaborative relationships: director Ernst Lubitsch with screenwriter Samson Raphaelson on The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a classic romantic comedy; director Wong Kar-Wai with cinematographer Christopher Doyle on Fallen Angels (1995), a tale of Hong Kong after dark; director Josef von Sternberg with actress Marlene Dietrich on Morocco (1930), the Mogador-set romantic drama that made the actress a household name in the U.S.; and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur who collaborated on the taut Brontë adaptation Wuthering Heights (1939). These films will be screened in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from December 1 to 21 and future selections will include director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker s The Aviator (2004), actors Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell s Seventh Heaven (1927), and director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev s Alexander Nevsky (1938). Though each member of the filmmaking team has a specific job, no one works in a vacuum, says Ms. He. Their collaborative efforts combine to produce the final film, and this reciprocity in the creative process often produces singular works. Images are available at

2 No. 118 Press Contact: Paul Power, (212) , or For downloadable images, please visit Please contact me for user name and password. Public Information: The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY Hours: Museum Adm: Film Adm: Subway: Bus: Wednesday through Monday: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Friday: 10:30 a.m.-8:00 p.m. Closed Tuesday $20 adults; $16 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D.; $12 full-time students with current I.D. Free, members and children 16 and under. (Includes admittance to Museum galleries and film programs) Target Free Friday Nights 4:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. $10 adults; $8 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $6 full-time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only) E or V train to Fifth Avenue/53rd Street On Fifth Avenue, take the M1, M2, M3, M4, or M5 to 53rd Street. On Sixth Avenue, take the M5, M6, or M7 to 53rd Street. Or take the M57 and M50 crosstown buses on 57th and 50th Streets. The public may call (212) for detailed Museum information. Visit us at Saturday, December 1 COLLABORATIONS IN THE COLLECTION SCREENING SCHEDULE 2:00 The Smiling Lieutenant USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda, based on the operetta Ein Walzertraum by Leopold Jacobson and Felix Dörmann, and on the novel Nux der Prinzgemahl by Hans Müller. With Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins. This vintage Lubitsch romantic comedy features a love triangle between a Viennese lieutenant, his worldly violinist girlfriend, and a naïve princess smitten with the soldier. The Smiling Lieutenant, Raphaelson s first screenplay and one of Lubitsch s first sound films, was the debut collaboration between the writer and director. The pair would work together steadily until 1948, when Raphaelson virtually stopped writing for film. This is also Hopkins s first film with Lubitsch who would cast her again in Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933) and one of five films that the director made with Chevalier. The Museum s print, acquired from the Danish Filmmuseum, features Danish subtitles. 83 min. 4:00 Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed) USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda, based on the play L Homme que J ai Tué by Maurice Rostand. With Lionel Barrymore, Phillips Holmes, Nancy Carroll. In one of Lubitsch s grand indictments of historical ills, a French soldier seeks out the family of a German soldier he killed during the Great War, only to fall in love with the man s fiancée. Another collaboration between Lubitsch and Raphaelson, Broken Lullaby is also the second screenwriting collaboration between Raphaelson and Vajda. Their third and final collaboration together, also with Lubitsch, was The Merry Widow (1934). 75 min. 6:00 Trouble in Paradise USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on the play The Honest Finder by Aladar Laszlo. With Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall.

3 This love triangle story begins in Venice, where two sophisticated con artists (Hopkins and Marshall) meet their match in one another, and winds up in Paris, where the pair target a wealthy heiress (Francis). The refined Marshall seduces the beautiful widow as part of the scam, but there s trouble in paradise when jealousy rears its none-too-subtle head. This is the third Lubitsch-Raphaelson collaboration released in 1932, following Broken Lullaby and One Hour with You. Acquired from Paramount Pictures. Preserved with funding from the Richard Griffith Memorial Fund. 81 min. Sunday, December 2 2:00 Duo luo tian shi (Fallen Angels) Hong Kong. Written and directed by Wong Kar- Wai. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. With Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro. This darkly humorous parallel-narrative film focuses on two characters one a professional killer, the other a freewheeling mute man and the eccentrics they encounter as they navigate Wong and Doyle s Hong Kong after dark, a stylistically frenetic world that is alternately cool and whimsical. Wong and Doyle began their collaboration in 1991 with Days of Being Wild, and their last film together was 2046 (2004). Of their work together, Doyle noted in The Observer in 2005 that the journey has been wonderful. Their efforts have produced a brilliant joint canon of films that feature signature recurring visuals (saturated colors, kinetic camera movements, uncommon camera angles, and close-ups) and themes (love and loss) that have evolved throughout their long collaboration. The director and cinematographer have described their technique together as organic and specific to their dispositions: Our styles come from the way we work (Wong). In Cantonese; English subtitles. Gift of Kino International. 96 min. 4:00 Cheun gwong tsa sit (Happy Together) Hong Kong. Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. With Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Chen Chang. Lai Yiu-Fai (Leung) and Ho Po-Wing (Cheung), two men begrudgingly and hopelessly in love with each other, leave Hong Kong for Buenos Aires. En route to Iguaçu Falls, they break up and go their separate ways. Lai, broke and unable to return home, gets a job as a doorman at a tango bar. Ho hustles to survive, then reappears in Lai s life but neither can reconcile being happy together. The film features a mélange of collaborations. In addition to the director/cinematographer partnership, Leung and Cheung are frequently cast in Wong s films, often playing variations on the same characters: Leung embodies lonesome men eternally unconsummated, and Cheung embodies reckless men eternally seeking from without what he needs to find from within. Gift of Kino International. In Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish; English subtitles. 97 min. Thursday, December 6 6:00 The Smiling Lieutenant. See Saturday, December 1, 2:00 8:00 Trouble in Paradise. See Saturday, December 1, 6:00 Friday, December 7 6:00 Cheun gwong tsa sit (Happy Together). See Sunday, December 2, 4:00 8:30 Duo luo tian shi (Fallen Angels). See Sunday, December 2, 2:00 Saturday, December 8

4 2:00 Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God) West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. With Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro. The storied collaboration between Herzog and Kinski is peppered with sensational tales. Herzog threatened to kill his lead actor during the production of this film the first of five that they would go on to make together. Yeah. That s all true. I wanted to kill him too (Kinski). So began a frenzied chapter in the careers of both director and actor during the surge of new German cinema. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Kinski plays a monomaniacal conquistador hell-bent on finding El Dorado. After mutinying from Pizarro s 1560 expedition in Peru, he leads his followers on a dizzying journey into insanity. Kinski s hypnotic onscreen presence is pitch-perfect for Herzog s tale of ambition, power, and madness. In German; English subtitles. 95 min. 4:00 Woyzeck West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog, based on the play by Georg Büchner. With Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann. Kinski plays everyman Woyzeck, a soldier in a nineteenth-century garrison town who takes on odd jobs (including serving as a doctor s guinea pig) to support his family. When he begins to suspect his wife of cuckolding him, he psychologically unravels, abetted by whispering voices both without and within his own mind. A morality play that implicitly questions the establishment, Woyzeck envisions a claustrophobic world that slowly pushes its proletarian protagonist to the breaking point. In German; English subtitles. 80 min. 6:00 Fitzcarraldo West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. With Klaus Kinski, José Lewgoy, Claudia Cardinale. Fitzcarraldo, an Irishman in Iquitos, Peru, is intent on building a grand opera house in the jungle town. To fund this fancy, he buys a cheap tract of land the size of Belgium on which to grow rubber trees, but to access this land he must haul a 320-ton steamship from one river to another over a mountain. Although set in the same location (Peru), fraught with equally trying production woes (including a plane crash, a border war between Peru and Ecuador, and exiting cast members), and similarly starring Kinski as a madman with an impossible dream, Fitzcarraldo has a lighter tone than Herzog s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The director elicits a subdued, even warm, performance from Kinski, who replaced Jason Robards in the titular role after Robards fell ill. In German; English subtitles. 160 min. Sunday, December 9 2:00 Morocco USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by Jules Furthman. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou. Dietrich plays a cabaret singer torn between protecting her heart and falling for Cooper s French Legionnaire. Von Sternberg and Dietrich s seven films together are perhaps the medium s most lauded director and actor/muse collaborations. Spotting Dietrich onstage in Germany, Von Sternberg immediately knew he had found his long-sought-after lead for The Blue Angel (1930). Their working relationship over the next five years led to frequent Svengali references as the director molded his star into the mythic Dietrich we know today. Screenwriter Furthman and cinematographer Garmes also collaborated with Von Sternberg in another Paramount production and Dietrich vehicle, Shanghai Express (1932). The pair would reprise their professional partnership for the third time with director Edmund Goulding s Nightmare Alley (1947), a Twentieth-Century Fox production featured in the MoMA exhibition Joan Blondell: The Bombshell from Ninety-first Street (December 19, 2007 January 1, 2008). 110 min. 4:00 The Docks of New York USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the story The Dock Walloper by John Monk Saunders. With George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova. A burly, fun-loving, easygoing steamship stoker rescues a hardened prostitute from suicide, but after winning her heart he callously abandons her, leaving money on the nightstand. The Docks of New York was one of the first films Furthman wrote for Von Sternberg, and the writer s distinctive stamp can be seen in the recurring character of the good/bad girl she brims with erotic enticement, but can also be warm-hearted and self-

5 sacrificing an archetype that especially served Von Sternberg s transformation of Dietrich. (Furthman penned the Von Sternberg/Dietrich films Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Blonde Venus.) 76 min. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. 4:30 The Scarlet Empress USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by Manuel Komroff. With Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe. In their sixth collaboration, Von Sternberg and Dietrich re-create the story of Catherine the Great. This lavish, melodramatic production focuses on the empress s rise to power and her many loves the two often interrelated. The film s blatant eroticism narrowly escaped the censors, as the Hays Code was enacted the same year as its release. 104 min. 5:45 Jet Pilot USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by Jules Furthman. With John Wayne, Janet Leigh, Jay C. Flippen. Decades after their first films together, Von Sternberg and Furthman reunited for this final collaboration. This campy Cold War drama, which wasn t released until seven years after its production, stars Wayne as a U.S. Air Force colonel who falls for a Russian jet pilot and spy. 113 min. Monday, December 10 6:00 Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed). See Saturday, December 1, 4:00 8:00 Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God). See Saturday, December 8, 2:00 Wednesday, December 12 6:00 Woyzeck. See Saturday, December 8, 4:00 8:00 Fitzcarraldo. See Saturday, December 8, 6:00 Thursday, December 13 6:30 The Docks of New York. See Sunday, December 9, 4:00 Silent, with organ accompaniment by Ben Model. 8:30 Jet Pilot. See Sunday, December 9, 5:45 Friday, December 14 6:30 Scarface USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Armitage Trail (Maurice Coons). With Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Osgood Perkins. Hecht s professional collaborations with Hawks, both credited and uncredited, began with Underworld (1927) and ended with Monkey Business (1952). Having won his first Academy Award for Underworld, Hecht used his heft in Hollywood to convince producer Howard Hughes to hire Hawks to helm this story of Tony Scarface Camonte and his rise in the Chicago underworld. [Ben] was so good because you could talk to him [and he] had an eye for it, if you told him something he could go write it so it sounded good to someone else. He spoiled you for other people to work with (Hawks). 93 min. 8:30 Barbary Coast (Port of Wickedness) USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur. With Miriam Hopkins, Edward G. Robinson, Joel McCrea. You don t want a couple of jackasses to remember me by? McCrea s Jim

6 Carmichael is an earnest poet, moonlighting as a gold prospector, who melts the steel heart of tough broad Mary Rutledge (Hopkins). Mary has arrived in San Francisco to find her fiancé dead and his wealth stolen by the city s resident hooligan and casino boss, Louis Chamalis. When Jim enters the picture, she s gone to work for Chamalis as a croupier and finds herself on the receiving end of his brutish affections. Barbary Coast, another collaboration between Hawks and Hecht, is written by the classic screenwriting pair of Hecht and MacArthur. The two enjoyed a friendship and professional collaboration that lasted a quarter-century and extended beyond screenwriting to producing, directing, and playwriting. 90 min. Saturday, December 15 2:00 Barbary Coast (Port of Wickedness). See Friday, December 14, 8:30 4:00 Gunga Din USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Joel Sayre, Fred Guiol, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling. With Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Hecht and MacArthur laid down the original story for this loose interpretation of Kipling s poem. Three British soldiers carouse and cavort in nineteenth-century India in this comic adventure. Preserved with funding from the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund. 117 min. 6:30 Wuthering Heights USA. Directed by William Wyler. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, based on the novel by Emily Brontë. With Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, David Niven. The last formal screenplay collaboration between Hecht and MacArthur is this adaptation of Brontë s tale of untamed and unrequited love on the Yorkshire moors. 102 min. Sunday, December 16 2:00 Scarface. See Friday, December 14, 6:30 Monday, December 17 6:00 Morocco. See Sunday, December 9, 2:00 8:30 The Scarlet Empress. See Sunday, December 9, 4:30 Friday December 21 6:00 Gunga Din. See Saturday, December 15, 4:00 8:30 Wuthering Heights. See Saturday, December 15, 6:30