With the introduction of small-gauge film stock in 1923 affordable home moviemaking was born. Over the subsequent decades, thousands of reels of amateur film were shot, amounting to one of the largest and most significant bodies of moving-image work produced in the 20th century. Artists, celebrities and the public at large, using 16- and 8-millimeter equipment, employed this unregulated, democratic form of personal filmmaking to produce work that is by turns amusing, sentimental, frank, and sometimes transgressive. Selected from MoMA’s celebrated 2019 gallery installation ‘Private Lives, Public Spaces,” the films in this program offer experiences of fame, family and place that are simultaneously familiar and strange.
With commentary by Museum of Modern Art Film Curator Ron Magliozzi and Film Collections Manager Katie Trainor, please join us for an afternoon with Charles Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Colleen Moore, Salvador Dali, Edward Steichen, and untold other lives preserved on film.