GME Launches The Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room with a Program of Holiday Shorts
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Today, Gartenberg Media Enterprises is honored to launch 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.
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.
As the holiday season approaches, GME’s launch of the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room comprises an international array of short films, a format that Adrienne championed throughout her career. The movies streamed here are primarily in the experimental vein, and thus are lesser-known movies in the canon of holiday films. This selection incorporates abstract and hand-painted films, found footage movies, puppet animation, and live action. The international reach of Mancia’s programming interests is represented here with films from the United States, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, and Germany.
Mancia personally knew many of these filmmakers and promoted the artistry of their films by programming their works at MoMA in their original celluloid formats. They range from the colorful abstractions of Marie Menken’s LIGHTS (1966) to Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic yearning in FIREWORKS (1947). The live action footage of a family at home in Karel and Borivoj Zeman’s A CHRISTMAS DREAM (1946) is combined with stop-motion puppet animation, while the live action footage of holiday shoppers on New York City streets is overlaid with Jerome Hill’s painted-on-celluloid imagery of Mary and Joseph with their donkey in MERRY CHRISTMAS (1969).
The politically-trenchant found footage film of Harun Farocki’s WHITE CHRISTMAS (1968) is contrasted with the humorous and gender-bending imagery constructed by George Kuchar in SOLSTICE (2009), and with a playful homage to Stan Brakhage in ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS (2015). Continuing to the link provided below, Lindsay Anderson’s EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS (1957) is a poetic and moving ode to Covent Garden.
Please enjoy this inaugural program, curated by the GME team.
JON GARTENBERG AND ADRIENNE MANCIA AT THE CINEMA RITROVATO FESTIVAL IN BOLOGNA, ITALY.
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.