Retirement of MoMA's Charles Silver

Rajendra Roy of The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film has forwarded this message about his colleague Charles Silver's forthcoming retirement.

Charles Silver in 1985

Dear Colleagues,

Today we celebrate Curator Charles Silver’s many decades of service to the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art. Having joined the department in 1970, Charles has remained steadfast in his leadership of the Film Study Center, dedication to access and belief in film as the most influential art form of the 20th Century.  In recent years, his "An Auteurist History of Cinema" series and accompanying blog posts provided a critical (and popular) window onto MoMA's vast film collection. His writings for the series will take the form of a soon-to-be-best-selling book from MoMA Publications to be released in the Spring of 2016.
 
Among Charles' numerous exhibitions are retrospectives for Elia Kazan, Roman Polanski, John Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Joan Blondell, The Hubleys,  Agnieszka Holland, Anna Mae Wong, John Wayne and  Sessue Hayakawa.  Rare are the thesis papers or scholarly books written on cinema in the past 40 years that do not thank Charles for his expert guidance.

December 1st, 2015 will be Charles' last day on staff at MoMA. Every staff person, regardless of their departmental affiliation, owes Charles a debt of gratitude for his advocacy on their behalf over the decades.  Charles Silver loves cinema and he loves MoMA, and we are all the better for it.

Rajendra Roy

The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St
New York, NY 10019