Published on the occasion of The Unfinished Film, an exhibition curated by Thomas Beard. What can be learned from unfinished films, from works that arrive to us as fragments? Considered collectively—from Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly to Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! to Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind and beyond—perhaps they constitute a secret canon, the most raw and, in turn, revealing sides of an artist’s practice. Included in the show were projects that are intentionally unfinished as well as those abandoned out of frustration, halted by dwindling resources, cut short by death, or curtailed by political circumstance. Representing cinema in a wide range of intermediary states, the works unveiled the particularities of their origins, lay bare the vicissitudes of their process and production.

With texts by Giorgio Agamben, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hollis Frampton, Sergei Eisenstein, Oskar Fischinger, Gregory Markopoulos, Annette Michelson, Robert Smithson, and Dziga Vertov.

Thomas Beard is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. He co-curated the cinema for Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1.