Photo: Regina Weinreich

Celebrating a retrospective at MoMA, cult filmmaker Abel Ferrara showed his music chops. The museum lobby, its platform facing the garden became a stage for Ferrara’s long time friends and collaborators Paul Hipp and Joe Delia, and some surprise vocalists Willem Dafoe, Gretchen Mol among them. Mol’s duet with Ferrara on guitar for “Bebopalula” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” homage to the late great Lou Reed, sent chills through the downtown art crowd including Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg, Marla Hanson; many have worked with Ferrara. This wild party, hosted by producers Annie and Ed Pressman, was most certainly a throwback to headier times.

Clips of Abel Ferrara’a movies, to be featured in the retrospective, looping in another part of the lobby, showed the remarkable Sylvia Miles in “Go Go Tales” from 2007. In a Chanelesque jacket, she performed with the late Burt Young, landlords to a Manhattan dance club run by Dafoe. The film was shot in Italy. Prior to the party, everyone saw Ferrara’s 1995 vampire classic “The Addiction,” starring Annabella Sciorra and Christopher Walken; both present too. The nostalgia was palpable.