Filmmaker Steven J. Ross will bring his just-completed feature-length documentary -- Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude -- to the Clark for a special advance screening in the auditorium at 7:30 pm on Friday, June 29th. Mr. Ross is previewing his film at select museums and colleges connected with the project, before general release and broadcast on television. He will be on hand to comment and answer questions after the showing.
The Clark’s marvelous collection of Winslow Homer work figures prominently in the film, as do a number of scholars associated with the Clark. But beyond any parochial interest, the film makes a case for Homer as an essential American master. While surveying a prodigious array of his work in illustration and painting, it tells the story of his life but also sketches the pivotal period of American life represented. Steve Ross has made a film that is visually, intellectually, and emotionally rich, and this is a remarkable opportunity to get an advance look.
The Winslow Homer biography will culminate a Clark film series called “Documenting Artists: Portraits in Film,” composed of documentary features on artists, all shown on Fridays at 7:30 in June. The Clark is trying an untraditional timeslot to make the films available to a wider audience, but except for the final filmmaker’s presentation each will also be shown at the regular Fridays at 4:00 slot. As usual, admission to films at the Clark is free.
June 8, 4:00 & 7:30: Michelangelo: Self-Portrait. (1989, 85 min.) Robert Snyder expands upon two earlier films (including his 1950 Oscar-winner The Titan) in which the camera swoons around the master’s work, adding a narration of Michelangelo’s own words and music by Monteverdi, for an enveloping and revelatory experience.
June 15, 4:00 & 7:30: Vincent: The Life & Death of Vincent Van Gogh. (1987, 99 min.) Paul Cox searches into Van Gogh’s paintings and the places he painted them, creating a canvas for his own intensely introspective portrait of the tortured artist, expressed in the words of Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo.
June 22, 4:00 & 7:30: The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. (2004, 90 min.) Amy Stechler conveys both the life and the times, but moreover the art, of the iconic Mexican painter, in all her painful beauty and tempestuous emotion, through well-chosen archival footage, eyewitness testimony, expert commentary, and close examination of the paintings themselves.
June 29, 7:30 only: Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude. (2007, 105 min.) Steve Ross focuses on the sweep of Homer’s work to illuminate his life, and also essential aspects of an America in historic transition, from the lively early engravings for Harper’s Weekly, through the crucible of Civil War, to a nostalgia for a childlike rural America, a clear-eyed look at the ex-slave’s view of Reconstruction, and on to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks and other landscapes, to reach apotheosis in the seascapes of Homer’s late lonely eminence at Prout’s Neck in Maine, so well represented in the Clark’s own collection.
This series is intended to celebrate not only the lives and works of artists through film, but also the art of documentary filmmaking itself, with each film exemplary in a distinctive manner, capped by the actual presence of an artful director/producer to conclude the survey.
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