Welcome to the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room. Here, you can stream films, clips, and other audiovisual ephemera related to the professional career of legendary film programmer and curator Adrienne Mancia.
Mancia, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 95, was a friend and colleague of GME’s. She worked closely with Jon Gartenberg in the film department at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1970s and ‘80s, where she redefined the field of film programming.
JON GARTENBERG AND ADRIENNE MANCIA AT THE CINEMA RITROVATO FESTIVAL IN BOLOGNA, ITALY.
Mancia’s enthusiasm for film was unparalleled, and her tastes were inclusive and far-reaching in terms of global cinema. An expert of the medium without ever being elitist, Mancia traveled all over the world in search of exciting new films and burgeoning filmmakers, as well as overlooked movies from cinema’s past. The diverse and boundary-pushing work that she programmed in New York City brought international auteurs, independent cineastes, and avant-garde filmmakers into the national consciousness, long before the dawn of home video and the Internet.
Gartenberg noted in Mancia’s New York Times obituary: “As this was before the age of videotape, internet, and niche movie channels, the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond… For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation. Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”
To read Gartenberg’s tribute to Adrienne in full, click here. To learn more about MoMA’s December 2023 In Memoriam celebration of Adrienne’s life and career, click here. To read about GME’s facilitation of the donation of Mancia’s archive to MoMA, click here.
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In 1963, while working as an assistant for producer Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola made his directorial debut with the mystery horror film DEMENTIA 13. As a programmer at The Museum of Modern Art, Adrienne Mancia was an advocate of progressive “New Hollywood” filmmakers such as Coppola who, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, subverted the moral and aesthetic traditions (and limitations) of the studio system by producing thematically and stylistically challenging work influenced by European cinema, the American avant-garde, and the countercultural ethos of the era at large. Part of Mancia’s advocacy of these filmmakers was seeking out their first works (often made for low-budget producers like Corman and production companies like American International Pictures) in order to chart the trajectory of their careers and connect their early output to the later works that brought them mainstream fame.