Friday, September 14, 2012, 8:00 p.m.

Presented by Cinema 16
Guest curator: Molly Surno

In an era when movies have been largely reduced to the tiny screens of laptops and iPods, Cinema 16 refreshes the communal viewing experience. Cinema 16 is a free-floating series named in honor of the underground 1950s New York City avant-garde film venue. Founded by the late Amos Vogel, the original Cinema 16 was a community of cinephiles who were interested in experimental and avant-garde films. Today, artist and curator Molly Surno keeps this collective passion alive, commissioning musicians to reinterpret short experimental films for site-specific performances.

For Moving Image, a selection of films based on extreme exploration and adventure, including psychedelic, terrestrial, and celestial travel, are being scored by New York artist and musician Alexis Georgopoulos’s solo project ARP. Fittingly for the collaboration, ARP’s music is an otherworldly fusion of analog synthesizers and classical instruments.

Gary Beydler’s Hand Held Day (1974, 6 mins. 16mm) depicts a day in the Arizona desert through time-lapse photography and a handheld mirror; Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten (1977, 9 mins. 16mm) illustrates the awesome scope and breadth of our relationship to the universe by zooming away from Earth (and returning); Robert Breer’s Fuji (1974, 9 mins. 16mm), through line drawing, rotoscope, and live action, lyrically depicts a train ride past Mount Fuji; Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker’s Les astronautes (1959, 12 mins. Digital projection) offers a surreal combination of live action, stop motion animation, and collage cutouts to tell the story of the adventures of an inventor who builds a spacecraft; Bruce Conner’s psychedelic Looking for Mushrooms (1967, 4 mins. 16mm) revolves around mushroom hunts by Conner and Timothy Leary in Mexico and San Francisco.

Tickets: $15 public / $9 Museum members / Free for Silver Screen members and above. Order online or call 718 777 6800 to reserve tickets.