MOMA Celebrates Miramax

New York's Museum of Modern Art is celebrating 25 years of the Weinsteins' company with some unexpected Miramax movies.

Jan 10 2005

New York's recently re-opened Museum of Modern Art has been loudly trumpeting its season devoted to the 25th anniversary of Miramax, the distribution and production company run by Harvey 'Scissorhands' Weinstein and his reputedly less charismatic brother Bob.

Rightly, the blurb points out Miramax's close links with Quentin Tarantino, but it also – in striving to emphasise the company's artistic credibility – namechecks a number of bona fide auteurs, including Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, whose 'Dead Man' and 'Through the Olive Trees', respectively, have been included in MOMA's tribute retrospective.

This, of course, may surprise anyone who has read either Jonathan Rosenbaum's 'Movie Wars' or Peter Biskind's 'Down and Dirty Pictures', both of which underline the fact that it has not been unknown for Miramax to 'bury' a picture which it deems uncommercial.

We can only wonder how Kiarostami (whose film was bought for distribution by Miramax but never released in the US) or Jarmusch (whose film was kind of released, though with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm as far as promotion was concerned) might describe their association with the company, or indeed what they might make of MOMA including their movies in the Weinstein tribute. Best, perhaps, not to ask…

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