MoMA honors Larry Fessenden with Major Retrospective
From March 30 to April 19, the Museum of Modern Art honors one of the pillars of indie and genre filmmaking with a career retrospective - Glass Eye Pix founder and longtime festival friend, Larry Fessenden. Fessenden first attended Oldenburg back in 1995, the second year of the Oldenburg Film Festival, with his now indie classic "Habit", and has been a regular presence with his films ever since.
From March 30 to April 19, the Museum of Modern Art honors one of the pillars of indie and genre filmmaking with a career retrospective - Glass Eye Pix founder and longtime festival friend, Larry Fessenden. Fessenden first attended Oldenburg back in 1995, the second year of the Oldenburg Film Festival, with his now indie classic "Habit", and has been a regular presence with his films ever since.
The finely curated retrospective entitled "Oh, the Humanity! the Films of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix" will also include the directorial films of his son Jack Fessenden, which had their world premiere in Oldenburg. His debute feature, "Stray Bullet", was presented by Larry an his then 16-year-old son Jack in Oldenburg in 2016, and "Foxhole" received rave reviews in Oldneburg at last year's festival.
"For more than 40 years, Larry Fessenden has not only reinvented and reinvigorated the horror and fantasy genres through his contemporary reinterpretations of mythic archetypes - the Chimera, the Vampire and the Leviathan, the Wendigo and the modern Prometheus - he has also nurtured the early careers of a wide range of talent as founder of the scrappy and decidedly independent New York production company Glass Eye Pix including Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass and Wendy and Lucy), Ti West (House of the Devil and The Innkeepers), Rick Alverson (The Comedy), Graham Reznick (I Can See You), Jim Mickle (Stake Land), Ilya Chaiken (Liberty Kid) and James Felix McKenney (Automatons and Satan Hates You). (...) Perhaps the true terror - and liberating promise - in Fessenden's body of work, which includes Habit (1997), No Telling (1991), Wendigo (2000), The Last Winter (2007), and Depraved (2019), is the extent to which the world today, our so-called Anthropocene epoch, has come to mirror his own uncanny visions of existential crisis: of ecological collapse and worldwide plague, historical trauma and amnesia, the dehumanizing effects of technology and a profound alienation from the animal world and ourselves through a failure of the empathic imagination.” - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
LINK: Oh, the Humanity! The Films of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix on moma.org
The retrospective celebrates Fessenden's extraordinary career as a writer, director, producer, actor, cinematographer, editor, and songwriter, and features more than 20 feature films screened in MoMA theaters.