In summer 2011, the film series, The Unfinished Film was programmed by Thomas Beard at the Gladstone Gallery in New York City, screening thirty-nine unfinished films by these wildly different filmmakers: Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein, Oscar Fischinger, Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton, David Gatten, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Maire Miéville, Jack Goldstein, Ken Jacobs, Gregory Markopolous, Albert and David Maysles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Robbins, Paul Sharits, Harry Smith, Erich von Stroheim, Leslie Thornton, Dziga Vertov, Andy Warhol. The programme selection interpreted widely what constitutes unfinished films. For instance, Pasolini's Notes on an African Orestes (1970), and Fisher's The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2) (1968), are completed films about the process of making films. The existing completed films from Frampton's unfinished calendrical epic, Magellan, was screened over the course of one week, although the entirety of the year-long structure was never fully realized. The thirty minutes of raw, unedited 16mm footage from Cha's unrealized White Dust from Mongolia was screened (as digital video), as was sixty-eight minutes of unedited 16mm footage (transferred to video) from Andy Warhol's never-completed Batman Dracula (1964).

In a small publication that accompanied the month-long screening program and exhibition, curator Thomas Beard asked in his opening introduction: "What can be learned from unfinished films, from works that arrive to us in fragments?" While his introduction does not answer this question, the viewing, compilation and pondering of these unfinished works, begins to consider it.

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