“Toil of the Soil: Films of Peasant and Yeoman” is a free film series offered by the Clark in conjunction with the major summer exhibition, “Pissarro’s People,” and looks at the realities of rural labor that were so close to the painter’s heart and eye.
Monday August 1 2:00 pm: Jean de Florette (1986, 121 min., in French with subtitles). Gerard Depardieu stars as the title character of Claude Berri’s adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel about a man who inherits a farm in Provence and tries to make a go of scientific cultivation, while canny old villager Yves Montand schemes to drive him off the land in this harsh but lovely, sad but engrossing drama.
Monday August 8 2:00 pm: Farrebique (1947, 85 min., in French dialect with subtitles). George Rouquier’s beautifully staged documentary follows a year in the life of an old French farm, in timeless images that recall Pissarro’s rural themes. The Clark is pleased to unearth and present this little-seen classic.
Monday August 15 2:00 pm: Pelle the Conqueror (1987, 150 min., in Swedish with subtitles). Max von Sydow is monumental and heartbreaking as the peasant hero of Bille August’s depiction of a life of hardship and toil in Sweden and Denmark around 1900, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Monday August 22 2:00 pm: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978, 185 min., in Italian dialect with subtitles). Ermanno Olmi’s epic saga follows four peasant families who live and work on an estate in Lombardy around 1900. Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.
Monday August 29 2:00 pm: Days of Heaven. (1978, 95 min.) Terrence Malick’s intense vision of farming on the Great Plains before World War I, which won an Oscar for cinematography, follows Richard Gere and Brooke Adams from the steel mills of Chicago to the wheat fields of Texas, where they labor for landowner Sam Shepard.
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