Former film critic and senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art film archive (MoMA), Dave Kehr will be at Sydney's Australian Film Television and Radio School on April 23 to talk about his career.
Kehr will also introduce one of his favourite early sound-era Hollywood classics: The Iron Mask (Dir: Allan Dwan, 1929, 95 mins, DCP (orig. 35mm), This will be a premiere and once only screening of MoMA's restored DCP.
The Iron Mask stars the king of Hollywood swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks Snr, in a lavish production originally released as a part-talkie, but only recently restored with its original Vitaphone sound-on-disc soundtrack.
The film was directed by Allan Dwan – one of Hollywood's most prolific directors, with an oeuvre of over 400 films made over 50 years, including ten films with Fairbanks.
The Sydney screening is presented by the Film Critics Circle of Australia (FCCA) and The Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
The Iron Mask has been preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Film Critics Circle of Australia and The Australian Film, Television and Radio School thank The Museum of Modern Art for funding Dave Kehr's visit to Australia and for supplying The Iron Mask Thanks also 20th Century Fox and Hollywood Classics.
Kehr is in Australia to attend the 2015 World Congress of the Federation of International Film Archives (FIAF), held in Sydney and Canberra from 11-18 April and presented by the National Film and Sound Archives of Australia.
Kehr is Adjunct Curator in the film department of New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was previously a film critic for the US newspapers The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News. Between 1999 and 2013 he wrote a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases. He also maintains the popular cinephile website davekehr.com and writes occasional columns on Hollywood screen history for US cinema journals such as Film Comment. He has been a past President of the US National Society of Film Critics, a member of the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board and a member of the jury of the 1994 Berlin Film Festival.