Delson, Susan

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Delson, Susan

PERSONAL:

Education: Degrees from University of Chicago and City University of New York Graduate Center.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Writer, filmmaker. Metropolitan Museum of Art, former film programmer; Museums magazine, former editor-in-chief; New York University, Museum Studies, former instructor. Director, Cause and Effect, short film, 1988.

WRITINGS:

Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Artforum, Art + Auction, Forbes, and Museum News.

SIDELIGHTS:

Filmmaker and former film programmer for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art Susan Delson authored the 2006 biography, Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card. Delson's interest in the early avant-garde film Ballet mécanique initially drew her to the eccentric filmmaker, who was fascinated with new cinematic forms and technologies and who has become known as an early Hollywood independent. Murphy started making short, silent films in 1920, many of which were inspired by classical music. Eventually, he went to Hollywood to direct larger pictures, though he never fit into the studio system. Over more than two decades of directing, he created films such as the avant-garde classic Ballet mécanique, which Delson describes on her home page as "an eye-popping, non-stop collision of images, from pumping machine parts to whirling pastry whisks to a girl on a garden swing," as well as The Emperor Jones. Delson contends in her book that many of Murphy's interests in filmmaking, such as his focus on short films and on the use of music to organize story line, have resurfaced in modern independent directors.

Reviewing the biography in Library Journal, Roy Liebman felt "this finely written and researched work will profitably add to the literature of such directors." Similar praise came from a Kirkus Reviews critic who called Dudley Murphy "a balanced portrait of a man and a panorama of his times, told with exceptional grace."