JOSEPH CORNELL ANNUAL CHRISTMAS SPECIAL. The artist Joseph Cornell used to entertain neighborhood children with film screenings. Today at 3:00 and 6:00 pm, Anthology Film Archives digs into Cornell's collection for a Children's Magical Movie Afternoon featuring vintage "fantasy trick films, stop-action animation, slapstick surrealism, animal antics, nickelodeon shorts, classic Méliès, vaudeville & cartoons."

At 6:30 pm, there's also a program of Cornell's Dream Films. As Anthology Film Archives puts it:

Cornell, a lover of symbolist poetry, recorded his dreams with the same reverence for concrete detail as the poets. In a poem dedicated to Cornell, Octavio Paz called any Cornell sculpture a "slot machine of visions." Cornell's early assistant and collaborator, Stan Brakhage, described Cornell's simple honesty, his faithfulness to what surrounds him: "He's always making reference to, not symbols, so much as just the fact of everyday existence of birds on a rooftop." This enchantment with the visible world filled Cornell's dreams as well as his work. In celebration of the publication of Joseph Cornell's Dreams, a collection of his dream journals edited by Catherine Corman, we present a program of his oneiric cinema, films ranging from the elusively surreal to the deeply real.
The show will include readings from the book.