McDonough Museum announces screening of Bruce Checefsky films
February 21, 2024
The McDonough Museum of Art has announced it will hold a screening of some of Bruce Checefsky’s most popular films in an event titled “Lost and Unmade: The Films of Bruce Checefsky.”
The screening will be held in the McDonough Auditorium Wednesday, March 20 at 5:30 PM. Entry is free and open to the public.
Checefsky is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer whose independent films have been shown all over the world. Using films that were lost, destroyed, or conceived but never produced, Checefsky recreates and reimagines abstract and avant-garde shorts. He focuses on pre-1920s and post-1935 films, with a special interest in those made by Jewish filmmakers that were destroyed during World War II.
“My short films require extensive, almost obsessive research to uncover the facts and materials surrounding the original lost film. I carefully unravel a filmmaker’s life story,” Checefsky said. “I am especially interested in the social, political, and economic conditions under which the lost film was originally made.”
The screening will include clips from “Witch’s Cradle” by Maya Deren, which was a collaboration between her and Marcel Duchamp; Andy Warhol’s confiscated 1963 film titled “Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love”; and Salmon Monny de Boully’s “Doctor Hypnison,” which was filmed but never produced. Also included is “Ulysses, Part 1” by Czech artists Karel Tiege and Jaroslave Seifert, which examines Poeticism; “Béla” by György Gerő, of which four pages of film script sit housed in the Budapest City Archives; “A Woman and Circles,” a study of Jan Brzękowski’s theory of abstract film; and Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s experimental film “Pharmacy."