Steven Spielberg Picked His Own MoMA Double Features. The Pairings Reveal More Than a Retrospective

Steven Spielberg is receiving the museum treatment at MoMA, but the most interesting part is that he helped design the lesson. “Sundays with Steven” begins today and runs through December 6, pairing six of his films with movies that influenced or inspired them. The series accompanies MoMA’s November 12 Film Benefit honoring the director. It is not a conventional career survey. Spielberg is asking viewers to watch his work beside the cinematic conversations that helped produce it.

The opening pairing places Duel, the 1971 television film that announced Spielberg’s control of suspense, beside Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Both understand that motion can become terror when the vehicle is a trap. The resemblance is not a claim that one film copied the other. It is an invitation to notice how tension is built through machinery, landscape, withheld information and the simple fact that stopping may be more dangerous than continuing.

Steven Spielberg selected six double features pairing his own work with films that influenced or inspired it. Image: WikiPortraits / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Later Sundays extend the method. MoMA pairs Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story with the 1961 film version, making adaptation visible across sixty years of choreography, camera movement and cultural debate. Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark sit inside a program that reaches toward the adventure and suspense traditions behind them. Munich and Bridge of Spies are placed beside political thrillers whose cool surfaces hide moral uncertainty. The schedule becomes a map of choices rather than a list of hits.

That is what a strong double feature can do. Watching two films together creates an argument that neither title carries alone. A cut, performance or musical cue in the second film may answer a question raised by the first. The viewer becomes an active editor, carrying visual memory across the break. Streaming libraries offer abundance, but they rarely explain why two works belong in the same evening. Curated pairing restores that sense of purpose.

Spielberg’s participation also challenges the idea that influential directors emerge from pure instinct. His films are often described through emotional immediacy: the child looking upward, the family under pressure, the ordinary person confronting history. Those images feel spontaneous because the craft is controlled. The MoMA program makes the library behind that control visible. Influence is not a weakness in authorship. It is the material authorship transforms.

The series arrives at a useful moment for theatrical film culture. Older movies are widely available in fragments, clips and recommendations, yet access can remain uneven and context thin. A museum screening gives a restored or carefully presented film a room, an audience and a reason to be watched from beginning to end. The double feature asks for more time than a casual stream. In return, it offers comparison that an algorithm cannot guarantee.

There is also pleasure in seeing a blockbuster filmmaker claim the role of film student. Spielberg’s commercial success can make his work seem like the center of the industry rather than one branch of a much older tree. By naming influences, he shifts attention toward directors, genres and visual strategies that audiences may not know. A viewer who comes for Jaws can leave curious about another period of suspense filmmaking. That curiosity is one of a retrospective’s most valuable products.

MoMA’s Film Benefit will honor Spielberg on November 12, and the institution describes him as one of cinema’s most influential figures. Celebration can flatten an artist into awards, box office and famous scenes. The Sunday program resists that flattening because it places the films back into uncertainty. Every pairing reminds viewers that a finished classic began as a set of decisions made among other possible decisions. The influential filmmaker was also influenced.

The selections should not be treated as a complete autobiography. Six pairings cannot explain a career that moves from science fiction and war films to musicals, historical drama and children’s adventure. They can reveal what Spielberg wants audiences to notice now. The omissions are part of the curation, and viewers may disagree with them. That disagreement is healthier than a checklist retrospective that pretends every title deserves the same conversation.

“Sundays with Steven” succeeds before the first discussion begins because its premise turns admiration into attention. It does not ask audiences to agree that every Spielberg film is a masterpiece. It asks them to look closely at how movies speak to other movies. The best tribute to a filmmaker is not a trophy or montage. It is a room where the work can be tested against the films that made it possible, with the lights down and the argument still alive.