FILM SCREENING: Assemblage, Merce Cunningham with Richard Moore (1968)

Film Screening: Assemblage, Merce Cunningham with Richard Moore (1968)
Thursday, March 14, 2024 at 7 PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free and open to all

Merce Cunningham with Richard Moore, 1968, 59 min, color, sound, 16mm film on video

Join us for a screening of Assemblage, a film created in 1968 by legendary choreographer, dancer, BMC faculty member Merce Cunningham, and dancer, poet, and renowned KQED producer Richard Moore. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded at BMC during the summer of 1953.

About Assemblage:

In the fall of 1968 Cunningham had the opportunity to create his very first extended work created expressly for television in collaboration with the filmmaker Richard Moore. Done for the KQED television station in San Francisco, Assemblage was made on location in Ghirardelli Square in that city. It represented the amalgamation of two distinct ideas; one, a film about the place itself, and the other, a film about the dance company. Ghirardelli Square was one of the first of those urban environments that now exist in many large cities, where a sometimes run-down market or manufacturing area has been restored, prettified, and made into a mall-like precinct with restaurants, boutiques, galleries, and promenades. (Other examples are Covent Garden Market in London and the South Street Seaport in New York.)

The film would show the dancers disporting themselves in this environment, as a kind of fanciful extension of the relationship between it and the people who normally visited it. Cunningham had gone out in February to look the place over. He and the company then spent three weeks there in late October and early November, rehearsing and shooting. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Ford Foundation.

In an interview, Cunningham told the San Francisco critic Robert Commanday that his idea was that “the finished film will deal not so much with dance in the narrow sense, but with various motions – boats moving, people walking, and, of course, groups dancing.” Meanwhile Moore, himself a former dancer, told an interviewer that Cunningham and his dancers were to make a number of “movement modules,” and the he (Moore) would “arrange the sequences and edit the final . . . product.”

Text courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust.

Stills from Assemblage, courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and the Merce Cunningham Trust: