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Rooftop Cinema: The Village Detective: a song cycle

August 25, 2022

8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

ABOUT ROOFTOP CINEMA 2022

Bring a friend, bring a blanket or camp chairs, and prepare yourself for an evening of independent films and videos under the stars. Rooftop Cinema returns to the Museum’s Rooftop Sculpture Garden each Thursday this August for its seventeenth season. Films begin at sundown, approximately 8 PM.


About The Village Detective: A song cycle

Bill Morrison | USA | 2021 | 81 minutes

In 2016, a fishing boat off the shores of Iceland caught four reels of 35mm film, seemingly of Soviet provenance, in its nets. The discovery wasn’t a lost work of major importance, but an incomplete print of a popular Soviet comedy from 1969, starring the beloved Russian actor Mihail Žarov. Bill Morrison, whose previous films Decasia and Dawson City: Frozen Time utilize lost, deteriorating footage, believes that the water-damaged print can be seen as a fitting reflection on the film work of Žarov, who re-emerges from the bottom of the sea 50 years later like a Russian Rip Van Winkle. Morrison uses the discovery as a jumping off point for his latest meditation on cinema’s past.

“Morrison’s movies feel like half-remembered reveries formed from memories you can no longer consciously recall. Hovering at the intersection of reappropriation, preservation, history, music, and art, any one of his works will haunt you for the rest of your life.” –Dan Schindel, Hyperallergic

Watch the official trailer.

Press:New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone


Ticket Information

  • Rooftop Cinema is $7 per screening, or free for MMoCA members and anyone age 18 and younger.
  • Ticket sales begin at 7:30 PM in the Museum Lobby.
  • Screenings relocate to the lecture hall if rain is predicted.