Back in 1979, former Village Voice film critic and filmmaker J. Hoberman made an avant-garde film called Mission to Mongo, but it was lost to the ages until a curator at the Anthology Film Archives requested a copy from the Queens Museum of Art, which screened it in 1982. Clean up your clutter, people: there may be a culturally significant artifact right under your nose.
QMA's Archives Manager/Curator Louise Weinberg details the search that ended up in a musty stack of film reels in a projector room:
In a bit of a panic the afternoon prior to their visit, the projection booth in our theater came to mind where stacks of reels and cans of film were stored on shelves above the projectors and sound equipment. Remnants of an artistic film program of the museum from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, these films complemented its exhibitions and education programs, but were never technically catalogued into the permanent collection.
The next morning, our world’s fair collection of films was inspected and inventoried in short time. I mentioned the stacks of reels in the projection booth as another possible location, and intrepid detectives Andrew and John enthusiastically volunteered to inspect the 40 or so reels. I left them in the projection booth.
About an hour later, they showed up at my desk holding aloft a large reel of four films spliced together, a compilation of avant-garde shorts. It was the last reel they’d examined. MISSION TO MONGO was the last film on the inside of the reel, one small ¼ inch of celluloid, along with AMERICA IS WAITING by Bruce Conner, RUNAWAY by Standish Lawder, and MYTH IN THE ELECTRIC AGE by Alan Berliner. Strangely, its condition was the best of the remaining copies, due to being stored for so many years in its location at the inside of the reel.
You can watch a film about the discovery of the film below (META), or check out our favorite avant-garde film of all time, Man Gets Hit By Football.
