Believe it or not, there was a time when Astoria, Queens was not the epicenter of all that is vibrant and progressive in New York City. It was a place to go for spanakopita and cheap rent. But if you moved there and wanted to entice your Manhattan-centric pals to visit, you could lure them with the promise of a cinephile’s paradise — the Museum of the Moving Image.
Adjacent to Kaufman Astoria Studios and housed in a former studio itself, MoMI’s permanent collection is a trove of movie-making hardware and filmland ephemera, broken down by department to form a Stations of the Cross of production, post-production, exhibition, and marketing. At its center is the Red Grooms and Lysian Luong-designed Tut’s Fever Movie Palace, where one can find a reanimated papier-mâché James Dean before watching an old Flash Gordon short. Not to mention the temporary exhibits (recent hits include salutes to 2001: A Space Odyssey and internet cat videos) and the ongoing and hopefully-never-leaving Jim Henson collection.
But one can visit MoMI dozens of times without even going upstairs, thanks to the stellar programming in its auditoriums. The foundational texts and esoteric gems I’ve encountered there are too numerous to list. I’ll just say it was here that I first watched Pasolini’s Salò (on a self-induced dare) and introduced my nephew to Invasion of Astro-Monster (which, so he reported at the time, was the greatest artwork ever created). Both were on 35mm.
As a critic, it’s thrilling to watch audiences grab their curated printout of a review or essay pertaining to what they are about to see. How much better would public life be if more people killed time reading NYFCC’s Amy Taubin instead of scrolling Instagram?
Over the years I’ve seen Martin Scorsese in conversation with Jerry Lewis, Jonathan Demme with Werner Herzog, and an uplifting expression of mutual admiration between the Museum’s current senior curator of film Michael Koresky and the late Terence Davies.
New York City is rich with miracles. MoMI is among the finest.