NEWSLETTER
December 6, 2024–January 24, 2025
Astoria, New York, November 21, 2024 — There’s nothing like a vast cinematic outdoor canvas of blinding white, or an interior scene surrounded by delicate falling snow. Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) will present the screening series See It Big: Let It Snow, from December 6, 2024, to January 24, 2025. Arriving in time for the holidays, this edition of See It Big—the Museum’s signature series featuring classic films on the big screen—includes 14 films that capture the magic and majesty of winter, from cozy holiday settings to forbidding snowy landscapes.
Family-friendly titles in See It Big: Let It Snow include The Empire Strikes Back (1980); Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (1994), starring Winona Ryder and presented in 35mm; David Lean’s romantic epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) in 35mm; the glorious holiday musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) in 35mm; Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1980/2006), starring Christopher Reeve; the Charlie Chaplin classic The Gold Rush (1925) in 35mm; and Robert Flaherty’s groundbreaking documentary Nanook of the North (1922).
The series also features 35mm screenings of John Carpenter’s Antarctic sci-fi thriller The Thing (1982), Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Akira Kurosawa’s Siberian adventure Dersu Uzala (1975), the Kurosawa-scripted Runaway Train (1985) directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and starring Jon Voight and Eric Roberts in Oscar-nominated roles, and Douglas Sirk’s glorious melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955). Selections also include Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining (1980); Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko’s World War II drama The Ascent (1977); and the 1969 James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
The schedule and descriptions for See It Big: Let It Snow are below and posted online at movingimage.org/series/see-it-big-let-it-snow. Advance tickets are available online.
SCHEDULE FOR SEE IT BIG: LET IT SNOW, December 6, 2024–January 24, 2025
All screenings take place in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or Celeste and Armand Bartos Screen Room at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, 11106. Please confirm schedule online and purchase tickets in advance at movingimage.org.
The Empire Strikes Back (Special Edition)
Friday, December 6, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Irvin Kershner. 1980, 124 mins. U.S. DCP. With Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, Frank Oz. In the second film released in the Star Wars series, George Lucas (no longer directing but clearly presiding) unveiled new landscapes (icy Hoth, swampy Dagobah, cloud-covered Bespin) and characters, such as Yoda (Oz), Lando Calrissian (Williams), and Boba Fett (voiced by an uncredited Jason Wingreen), who remain in the vernacular 40-plus years later.
Dersu Uzala
Saturday, December 7, 12:45 p.m.
Sunday, December 15, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Akira Kurosawa. 1975, 144 mins. Japan/USSR. 35mm. With Maxim Munzuk, Yury Solomin. One of Kurosawa’s greatest films, this spellbinding Soviet-Japanese coproduction follows a Russian cartographer at the turn of the 20th century as he surveys a region in the Far East of Russia with the help of Dersu Uzala, a Goldi nomad hunter as his group’s guide. Thus begins an emotional bond between the two men that will span years and further adventures. Both intimate and spectacular, this thrilling, Oscar-winning film evokes an almost otherworldly vision of Siberia.
Little Women
Sunday, December 8, 12:30 p.m.
Friday, December 13, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Gillian Armstrong. 1994, 119 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Winona Ryder, Gabriel Byrne, Susan Sarandon, Trini Alvarado, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes, Samantha Mathis, Christian Bale, Eric Stoltz. The best adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Armstrong’s magnificent and deeply heartfelt film, shot partly on location in exquisitely wintry Massachusetts, stars an incandescent, Oscar-nominated Ryder as Jo March. Richly observed, Armstrong’s Little Women transports the viewer to both a different time and into the intellectual interior world of its indefatigable literary protagonist. Also part of MoMI Moviehouse.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Sunday, December 8, 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, December 14, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. Robert Altman. 1971, 120 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, David Carradine, Shelley Duvall. Altman turned the western on its head with this brilliant bit of revisionism, starring Beatty as a huckster and gambler who takes over a small northwestern town at the turn of the twentieth century; Christie, in an Oscar-nominated role, is the madam of the brothel he opens as a business venture. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is given its unique textures by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who films the snowy environs with grim majesty.
All That Heaven Allows
Friday, December 20, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, December 21, 4:15 p.m.
Dir. Douglas Sirk. 1955, 89 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead. Brilliantly shot with expressionistic hues and elaborate compositions, All That Heaven Allows follows the heartbreaking May-December romance between a well-to-do suburban widow and a lower-class bohemian gardener. Perhaps the greatest of Sirk’s glorious melodramas, All That Heaven Allows traces the melancholy transition of the seasons from crisp autumnal glory to deeply snow-blanketed winter, perfectly expressing the heartrending interiority of the beautifully wrought characters.
Doctor Zhivago
Saturday, December 21, 12:30 p.m.
Sunday, December 22, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. David Lean. 1965, 197 mins. U.K. 35mm. With Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham. Following the seismic cultural event of his Lawrence of Arabia, grand-scale moviemaking became Lean’s forte in the sixties, and Doctor Zhivago is among his grandest triumphs. A Russian winter spectacle, Zhivago is a complexly plotted, sophisticated adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s blockbuster novel, charting the love triangle amongst Sharif’s sensitive doctor Yuri, his wife Tonya (Chaplin), and the long-suffering Lara (Christie, acting in the same breakout year she won an Oscar for Darling), set against the Bolshevik Revolution. As emotionally involving as it is visually spectacular, the film features Oscar-winning cinematography from Freddie Young and score by Maurice Jarre.
Meet Me in St. Louis
Saturday, December 21, 6:15 p.m.
Sunday, December 22, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Vincente Minnelli. 1944, 113 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Leon Ames. In Minnelli’s bittersweet turn-of-the-century tale, his first color film and one of the greatest musicals ever made, a family contends with life, love, and an impending move from St. Louis to New York City. Featuring extended Halloween and Christmas sequences that place it firmly within multiple holiday movie canons, the alternately whipsmart wry and gorgeously sentimental Meet Me in St. Louis is an endlessly rewatchable treasure. Songs include “The Boy Next Door,” “The Trolley Song,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Also part of MoMI Moviehouse.
The Shining
Saturday, December 28, 5:45 p.m.
Monday, December 30, 5:00 p.m.
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. 144 mins. U.S. 4K DCP. With Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Loyd. Rivers of blood spew from an elevator. The ghosts of two girls beckon in a hallway. An axe blasts through a bathroom wall to get at the terrified woman inside. With remarkable performances by Nicholson and Duvall, iconic set design, and groundbreaking Steadicam photography, Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is a psychological horror masterpiece in which writer Jack Torrance is driven mad while working as the caretaker of a cavernous Colorado hotel over the course of one isolated winter. Simply put, this is one of the most aesthetically influential films ever made.
Nanook of the North
Saturday, December 29, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Robert Flaherty. 1922, 79 mins. U.S. Digital projection. Flaherty’s groundbreaking documentary, which intimately hunkers down with an Inuit family, headed by Nanook, as they live and survive the harsh winters of Canada’s Hudson Bay, was so popular it became a cultural phenomenon, bringing the hunter-gatherer of the title into the American lexicon and even inspiring a hit song. While Flaherty’s work would inspire ethnographic filmmaking in the coming years, Nanook of the North is now known for its stretching of reality for the sake of narrative: the principals were actually cast by Flaherty to simulate a family. Nevertheless, the film remains a classic, an immersive account of people few moviegoers had been exposed to, all of it photographed with fascinating and influential detail. Also part of Silents, Please.
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
Monday, December 30, 2:30 p.m.
Tuesday, December 31, 2:30 p.m.
Dir. Richard Donner. 1980/2006, 116 mins. U.S. DCP. With Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Terence Stamp, Jackie Cooper, Ned Beatty, Marlon Brando, Sarah Douglas, Jack O’Halloran. This sequel to Donner’s 1978 comic-book smash Superman deepened both the human drama and the humor for a tour de force that outmatched the original. With its unforgettable scenes set at Superman’s icebound Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, and Stamp’s mesmerizing General Zod, the franchise’s greatest villain, Superman II remains the best of the series. Yet the backstory of the production is as much a part of Hollywood lore: due to tensions with the producers, Donner was fired from the film with three-quarters already in the can, and Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) was brought in to finish, resulting in his reshooting most of it. Decades later, the original Donner footage was recovered from a vault in England and the director’s original vision was restored, including scenes originally cut.
The Thing
Saturday, January 4, 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, January 5, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. John Carpenter. 1982, 109 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David. In remaking Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World, horror master Carpenter fashioned his own chilling classic, featuring some of the ooziest and most imaginative practical effects ever created for the screen. Carpenter’s terrifying marvel follows a group of scientists, trapped in a remote Antarctic outpost, who are beset by a shape-shifting extraterrestrial force that is able to enter anyone’s body undetected. With its jaw-dropping gallery of creepy-crawlies and gorgeous widescreen compositions set against the desolate environment’s endless snowbound winter, this is one to see in a theater—in the dark amidst the gasps of an awestruck audience.
Runaway Train
Sunday, January 5, 1:00 p.m.
Saturday, January 11, 12:45 p.m.
Dir. Andrei Konchalovsky. 1985, 110 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca De Mornay. Voight and Roberts both received Oscar nominations for their gripping, physically instinctive performances in Konchalovsky’s bullet-paced American thriller based upon an original story by Akira Kurosawa. After being released from three years in solitary confinement, convicted bank robber Manny (Voight) enfolds fellow prisoner Buck (Roberts) in his plan to escape via a sewer tunnel. Once emerged, the two men hijack a locomotive, embarking on a journey with authorities in hot pursuit and railroad officials trying to stop them. As they shuttle off into the wintry Alaskan hinterlands, their ride to freedom grows increasingly existential.
The Gold Rush
Friday, January 10, 4:00 p.m.
Saturday, January 11, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. Charlie Chaplin. 1925, 72 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale. Chaplin’s sublimely funny and exquisitely made comedy is one of the unparalleled triumphs of silent cinema, an avalanche of groundbreaking effects, astonishing stunts, and humor made poetic. Here, Chaplin’s Little Tramp is a lone prospector who hikes it to the Klondike, hoping to strike it rich and eventually finding romance with the splendid Georgia Hale. Inspired by Chaplin’s researching the Donner Party, The Gold Rush is a supreme cinematic example of the filmmaker’s effortless grace against all odds, and features one iconic set piece after another, from the boiled shoe supper to the dance of the dinner rolls to the precarious cabin tipping over the cliff’s edge. Also part of Silents, Please.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Sunday, January 12, 12:30 p.m.
Friday, January 17, 7:00 p.m.
Dir. Peter R. Hunt. U.K. 1969, 142 mins. 4K DCP. With George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Bernard Lee. The sixth installment of the peaking Bond franchise featured George Lazenby, a model with no previous acting experience, to fill Sean Connery’s already iconic shoes. The resulting film, highly criticized at the time for the unseasoned Lazenby’s more reticent and vulnerable approach to the character, remains perhaps the most cinematically accomplished of the franchise, directed by series editor Hunt and lensed by the great Hammer Films cinematographer Michael Reed (The Gorgon, Dracula: Prince of Darkness) with an almost Hitchcockian sense of pace and visual poetry, while taking full advantage of the Swiss Alps.
The Ascent
Sunday, January 19, 3:45 p.m.
Friday, January 24, 5:00 p.m.
Dir. Larisa Shepitko. 1977, 111 mins. USSR. DCP. With Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yakovlev. Against the harsh, snow-choked, wind-swept backdrop of Nazi-occupied Belorussia, a pair of Soviet partisans find themselves separated from their troop and thrust into a fight for survival. Shepitko, who studied under fellow Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko at Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (alongside fellow student Andrei Tarkovsky) was one of the most thrillingly original voices of her generation of Soviet filmmakers, though her career was cut short by her death at age 41. The Ascent is the ultimate statement of her astonishing talent, a work of visceral physicality and spiritual allegory that turns the World War II battlefield into a site of exhilarating and terrifying martyrdom.
About Museum of the Moving Image (movingimage.org)
Founded in 1985, MoMI celebrates the history, art, technology, and future of the moving image in all of its forms. Located in Astoria, New York, the Museum presents exhibitions; screenings; discussion programs featuring actors, directors, and creative leaders; and education programs. It houses the nation’s most comprehensive collection of moving image artifacts and screens over 500 films annually. Its exhibitions—including the core exhibition Behind the Screen and The Jim Henson Exhibition—are noted for their integration of material objects, interactive experiences, and audiovisual presentations.
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Press contacts:
Tomoko Kawamoto, tkawamoto@movingimage.org, 718 777 6830
Jayna Zelman, Rubenstein, momi@Rubenstein.com
PRESS IMAGES
Pictured: Little Women (courtesy of Columbia Pictures/Sony) | Press gallery
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