View of rear façade. The new three-story addition designed by Leeser Architecture is clad
in a skin of very pale blue aluminum panels. Image courtesy of vuwstudio.com / Museum
of the Moving Image.

January 3, 2011 - In celebration of the grand re-opening of America’s only museum dedicated to film, television, and digital media, the American Museum of the Moving Image has announced a six week inaugural schedule of screenings and special programs. The expanded Museum includes a new 267-seat theatre, a 68-seat screening room, new galleries, and multiple screening spaces for video art.

The transformed Museum will open to the public on January 15, 2011. In observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and to celebrate the Museum’s opening, admission will be free on Monday, January 17, 2011.

The entire six weeks of inaugural programs will be titled Celebrating the Moving Image. Highlights of programs during the opening weeks include:

• the New York premiere of the restored print of John Ford’s Upstream, the long-lost 1927 feature recently rediscovered in New Zealand, with music by four musicians led by acclaimed accompanist Donald Sosin
• the world premiere of a lustrous restored print of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler
• a rare screening of Manoel de Oliveira’s five-hour masterpiece Doomed Love in a restored print
• a virtually once-in-a-lifetime screening of avant-garde master Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios: Cycle Five, a section of the 80-hour-long epic film he made for projection at his open-air theater in Greece
• a special screening on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of an archival print of King: A Film Record…Montgomery to Memphis, the major documentary made for a one-night-only showing at 600 theaters nationwide in 1970

Visitors are invited to attend these special screenings; admission to the films is first-come, first-served.

The Museum also offers various activities for families and children. Matinee screenings every Saturday, Sunday and holiday weekdays are designed to introduce adventurous children to the pleasures of great cinema. Family screenings will include films selected from Museum retrospectives as well as films especially programmed for budding cinephiles and their parents. Workshops will offer children the opportunity to learn filmmaking techniques from accomplished artists.

For more information about the Museum of the Moving Image, visit movingimage.us.