As part of MoMA's preservation festival To Save and Project, and its artist cinema series Modern Mondays, Heather McAdams joins us to present new 16mm restorations of her irreverent collage films from the 1980s, recently preserved by the Chicago Film Society

Known for her work as a cartoonist and filmmaker, McAdams has long been a fixture of Chicago’s alternative film and music scenes and was once hailed by B. Ruby Rich in the Chicago Reader as combining “the collage finesse of a Bruce Conner with the crude campiness of the Kuchar brothers.”

Initiated amid the flowering of artisanal cinema in 1960s New York and continuing uninterrupted until today, the moving-image careers of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler are among the most captivating in film history. Their art, driven by the quest for a humanely lyrical cinema, transfigures ordinary surroundings into intimate glimpses of transcendence and offers audiences the experience of vision as an open form of poetry.

An Evening with Leslie Thornton
Mon, Feb 12, 7:00 p.m.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

It’s almost criminal that Narcisa Hirsch isn’t a household name by now, at least in the homes of those passionate about the histories of performance art and cinema. Then again, the 95-year-old Hirsch, who was born in Berlin in 1928 and emigrated to Argentina in 1937, has playfully called herself una famosa cineasta desconocida (a famous unknown filmmaker), acknowledging her own marginalization but also the freedom that comes with some degree of anonymity.