Jonas Mekas, Notes for Jerome, 1978
This past May, the Walker’s Moving Image department launched the Mediatheque, an interactive place to view films located in the former lecture room off the Bazinet Lobby. This innovative cinema provides visitors with the unique opportunity to control their own viewing experience. Visitors can add films to the queue as well as browse curated playlists (think, “Cinemas of Resistance” or “Bodies in Motion”). Nearly 80 films digitized from the Ruben Bentson Moving Image Collection populate the Mediatheque, including Soviet silent classics, European and American experimental shorts, and lyrical cinema. Filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Bruce Baillie, Sergei Eisenstein, William Klein, and Yvonne Rainer are represented.
In late September of 2015, the Mediatheque will see another 76 films added to the selection. Prevalent in this addition are the Fluxus films of John Cale and Yoko Ono, Weimar-era German silent cinema, video art from Skip Blumberg, Leslie Thornton, and Nam June Paik, and early animation. Accompanying each film is a short description that provides background and context. Users can search the selection by genre, director, decade, and nationality and add or remove films from the queue at any time.
The Mediatheque acts as a resource for the casual museum-goer as well as the dedicated cinephile or film academic. When the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection was created over 40 years ago, the curators intended the collection to reflect the history of cinema and trace the development of moving image mediums. The digitized versions presented in the Mediatheque honor and preserve a rich history of cinema at the Walker Art Center.
For more information about the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection, watch this short documentary featuring previous curators of the Moving Image department.
To schedule a screening in the Mediatheque, please email movingimage@walkerart.org.
