“The Bay Area Arrives” Historic Film Night at SFMOMA

For the SFMOMA’s 75th anniversary, three guest curators will explore film in the context of the history of modern visual arts and assemble programs from three successive eras. In Program  3, entitled “The Bay Area Arrives”, Scott MacDonald, one of the country’s foremost film historians, looks at 1937 through 1960.

75 Years in the Dark: A Partial History of Film at SFMOMA
February 25, 2010 Film Program:

• Mother’s Day, James Broughton, 1948, 23 min.
• No. 2 and No. 3, Harry Smith, 1947, 5 min.
• Sausalito, Frank Stauffacher, 1949, 10 min.
• Lead Shoes, Sidney Peterson, 1949, 17 min.
• Notes on the Port of St. Francis, Frank Stauffacher, 1952, 20 min.

In 1937, Grace McCann Morley set up a screen and some chairs in the rotunda of the War Memorial Veterans Building (SFMOMA’s first home) and showed films: D. W. Griffith, Walt Disney, The Jazz Singer, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the first ever Movietone newsreel featuring George Bernard Shaw. She believed that film, the 20th century’s very own visual art form, should have a place in a museum of modern art.

From the beginning, it’s been an eclectic and inclusive mix: high- and lowbrow; shorts and features; fiction and documentary; studio, independent, and artists’ films; video and digital media.

*$5 general; free for SFMOMA members or with museum admission (requires a free ticket, which can be picked up in the Haas Atrium). Tickets are available at the Museum (with no surcharge) or online.