Michael J. Anderson, Director of Curatorial Affairs
About: In 2013, Anderson earned his Ph.D. in History of Art and Film Studies from Yale University. Anderson has been published on a wide variety of film topics, including new Iranian cinema, the French new wave, post-war Japanese film, Bollywood, 21st century Hollywood and the work of Howard Hawks, the subject of his dissertation. Anderson was the long-time proprietor of two award-winning film and visual arts blogs, Tativille and Ten Best Films.
By 1939, in the work of Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), the cinema achieved a measure of formal brilliance and complexity that it has very rarely matched, and still hasn’t surpassed, in the nearly eighty years since. With The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), which is often considered the pinnacle of the director’s prewar career, and… Learn More
In the freedom that emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the repressed returned to screens on both sides of the Allied Atlantic. In the United States, it went by the name of film noir, a now-iconic generic classification that brought cynical stories and dark pools of shadow to American movie-houses. German and Eastern… Learn More
In its sixty-seventh year, the Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, continues to function as one of the better barometers for the current climate of world cinema. It is in Berlin, after all, that X-Men universe blockbusters (Logan) and generations-late sequels (T2 Trainspotting)–I didn’t happen to see either–receive their international, red-carpet premieres, next to ethnographic… Learn More
Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 masterwork The Flowers of St. Francis, whose Italian title, Francesco, giullare di Dio translates as “Francis, God’s Jester,” seeks less to tell the story of its saint’s life than to show the impact of “the Franciscan message… and spirit” on its followers. This axiomatic expression of Italian neorealism depicts both scenes from the life… Learn More
Thanks to the continual health of the international art cinema, a deeper dive into recent Chinese independent filmmaking, key restorations, and a Jean Renoir program precipitated by the Museum’s “Matisse in His Time” exhibition, Oklahoma City audiences had many fine alternatives to the multiplex in 2016. Among the more than seventy new releases that Museum Films programmed during that… Learn More
Once stupidly dismissed by French film critic and director François Truffaut as a “contradiction of terms,” the British cinema was responsible for a great number of outstanding films throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, first with the poetical, wartime non-fiction of Humphrey Jennings (Listen to Britain) and the myth-focused collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Life… Learn More
A Catalan filmmaker and educator whose body-of-work consists predominately of documentaries and shorts, José Luis Guerín achieved universal acclaim with his fictional 2007 feature, In the City of Sylvia, a minimally plotted portrait of an artist who falls under the spell of the titular Sylvia. Comprised, for much of its frequently dialogue-free duration, of shot/counter-shot sequences of the artist observing café… Learn More
As Museum Films begins its October-November 2016 program with three new non-fiction features this Thursday, it is the most experimental of the group, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens (2016), whose cause—cinematically—I am most eager to champion. Born in Vienna in 1972, Geyrhalter attained his greatest international notoriety to date for Our Daily Bread, a 2005 documentary that explores uses of technology and unskilled… Learn More
Historically Unprecedented Growth Over the course of a single year, China, by its own measure, lifted nearly 40 million people out of poverty. In 2013 alone, China’s share of the world’s extreme poor fell an astonishing 5 percentage points, from 13 to 8 percent. Between 2008 and 2011, China and India (which continues to be much… Learn More
One of the greatest pleasures of the major international film festival is the opportunity to see the latest work by leading international auteurs. In the case of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, whose masterful previous feature Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) played at the Museum earlier this month, there has been at least one “latest” film every year since 2008, and… Learn More
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