By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

MoMA Film Curator Dave Kehr Awarded Insignia Of Chevalier Of The Order Of Arts And Letters

Posted Wednesday, June 14th, 2017 - Comments Off on MoMA Film Curator Dave Kehr Awarded Insignia Of Chevalier Of The Order Of Arts And Letters
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Dave Kehr

A lifelong friend of France, Mr. Kehr has committed in his recent work as a curator, to support the film preservation and strengthened dialogue with foreign cinematheques including the Cinémathèque Française, by exchanging restored films for the creation of retrospectives or series. The passion he has had throughout his life for the seventh art, and the role French cinema has played in developing and refining this field, has led him to support foreign cinematography and international artistic dialogue.

Kehr attended the University of Chicago, where he studied English, learned French in part by reading the French Cahiers du cinéma and Positif pieces on film.When president of the film society Doc Films, Kehr served as film critic for the Chicago Reader and then for the Chicago Tribune, before relocating to New York to become film critic for the Daily News and then The New York Times. As a cinema critic, Dave Kehr gave particular attention to French movies of all genres. In 2013, he joined the Museum of Modern Art team as Adjunct Curator in the film department, before being appointed curator in 2017.

The order of Arts and Letters (ordre des Arts et des lettres) was established in 1957 to recognize eminent artists and writers, as well as people who have contributed significantly furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. The Order of Arts and Letters is given out three times annually under the jurisdiction of the minister of Culture and Communication. American recipients of the award include Paul Auster, Ornette Coleman, Agnes Gund, Marilyn Horne, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Meier, Robert Paxton, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Uma Thurman.

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy promotes the best of french arts, literature, cinema, language, and higher education across the US. Based in New York City, Washington D.C and eight other cities across the country, the Cultural  Services brings artists, authors, educational and university programs to cities nationwide. It also builds partnership between french and American artists, institutions and universities on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York, through its bookshop, Albertine, it fosters French American exchange around literature and the arts.

 

 

MoMA Film Curator Dave Kehr Awarded Insignia Of Chevalier Of The Order Of Arts And Letters 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon