COURTESY MOMA
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24
Screening: The Forbidden Room at the Museum of Modern Art
Canadian filmmaker and artist Guy Maddin has become known for his wacky, unhinged vision in the past decade, and it says something that The Forbidden Room has been considered one of his craziest films to date. Released earlier this year and now playing as part of MoMA’s “The Contenders” series, which surveys 2015’s best films, The Forbidden Room features a number of stories within stories and an aesthetic that recalls old Hollywood film, but done through deliberately upscaled and damaged digital techniques. A massive cast and creative team included everyone from John Ashbery to Udo Kier. Maddin and his co-writer Evan Johnson will be present at the screening to introduce the film.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 6:45 p.m., $8/$10/$12
©THAW COLLECTION/COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART AND THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Opening: “Trees: Oil Sketches from the Thaw Collection” at the Morgan Library & Museum
Trees are arguably one of the more underrated subjects in painting. This exhibition celebrates the visual power of these plants in 19th-century oil-on-paper paintings by French, German, and Scandinavian artists. This technique was popular among landscape artists as trees became a significant motif; a press release states, “Forests and gardens, as well as single majestic specimens, provided a challenging focus for artists learning to capture light, color, and texture in oils. Upright and uprooted trees allowed for close, prolonged study, while their leafy bowers gave artists the opportunity to grapple with depicting movement and the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere.”
The Morgan Library & Museum, 10:30 a.m.—5:30 p.m.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 27
Screening: Far from Heaven at the Film Society of Lincoln Center
In Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), based on Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), a ’50s housewife catches her husband kissing another man. Nobody finds out, but she starts to feel like an outcast—this was the ’50s after all—and, to top it all off, she starts falling in love with a black man. Playing as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Haynes retrospective, Far from Heaven is one of the director’s most subversive, tender films, and finds Julianne Moore giving one of her finest performances, which, naturally, involves a lot of crying. Like Haynes’s newest film, Carol, Far from Heaven is an old-school melodrama without the camp, a rarity these days.
Film Society of Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 2 p.m., $9/$11/$14
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 28
Screening: Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation
For its third year of screenings at Pioneer Works, Chicago-based experimental animation film festival Eyeworks will show two programs of short videos and 16mm films by both classic and contemporary artists such as Robert Breer, Suzan Pitt, Jules Engel, Yoriko Mizushiri, Peter Burr, and Amy Lockhart. These shorts “[blend] an appreciation of classical animation with the sensibilities of avant-garde cinema and the visual culture of alternative comics,” according to a release, featuring abstract aesthetic for the purpose of developing unique characters.
Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 6—8:30 p.m.
COURTESY THE STATHES COLLECTION
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29
Screening: “Cartoon Cats of the Silver Screen” at the Museum of Moving Image
As a supplement to their ingenious “How Cats Took Over The Internet” exhibition, the Museum of Moving Image presents a 90-minute compilation of rare archival 16mm prints featuring the most popular feline stars circa 1910 to 1930. (Felix the Cat and Krazy Kat make appearances.) These comics and cartoons, courtesy the collection of animation historian Tommy José Stathes, prove that our collective cultural obsession with cats is hardly a new phenomenon.
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria, Queens, 2 p.m. Tickets $12/9