Celebrate Short Film Day with GME's Program of Holiday Shorts in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room

Today, December 21st, is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and has therefore been declared Short Film Day in Germany. December 28th is also recognized as Short Film Day in the United States, in honor of the Lumière brothers’ first public screening of moving pictures (all of which were shorts) at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28th, 1895.

Celebrate Short Film Day this year by visiting the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, where a program of holiday-themed shorts, curated by the GME team, is now available to view.

The short film was a format that Mancia championed throughout her career. The films in this program are primarily experimental, 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 Zemen’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).

This program also includes an external link to the Internet Archive, where Lindsay Anderson’s EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS (1957) — a poetic and moving ode to Covent Garden — can be viewed.