Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

SCOTT MACDONALD SELECTS: BIRTH, EARTH, SCREEN, SKY

February 26 – February 28

“What and how does one see when little light is available?” –Scott MacDonald, COMPREHENDING CINEMA

“Birth, Earth, Screen, Sky” commemorates the completion of Scott MacDonald’s “Avant-Doc Trilogy” and celebrates his many decades as an educator, scholar, and champion of the moving image. MacDonald’s extensive body of critical interviews and historical scholarship has been an essential education for countless admirers of avant-garde cinema, both inside and beyond the space of the classroom. This collaborative series, programmed by MacDonald and three of his former students, represents the vast and varied influences that his pedagogical approach to cinema has inspired in our lives as film workers, scholars, artists, and cineastes.

These selections wander through the infinitely diverse pathways of “comprehending cinema”: beginning from birth and the development of the senses, to the discovery of our physical, material environment(s), moving to the processes of interpreting our vast screen worlds, and culminating in the contemplation of its most ineffable, affective mysteries.

This series draws together filmmakers and critical scholarship from MacDonald’s books, “Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema” (2014), “The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama” (2019), and “Comprehending Cinema” (2024) (all published by Oxford University Press).

Guest-programmed by Ava Witonsky, Annie Berman, and Isha Parkhi. Each screening will be followed by a discussion between Scott MacDonald and the curators.

Upcoming Screenings

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