In anticipation of the Clark Art Institute exhibition, "A Walk in the Country: Inness and the Berkshires," which opens February 6, a film series called "A Hop-Skip-&-Jump Across America: In Search of the Cinematic Landscape," will be offered beginning Friday, January 14, at 4:00.
This film series will travel across America through a selection of films in which the landscape is an important character in its own right. Organized in triads, each group of films travels through time as well as space, from distant to recent past to something like the present. All films will show on Fridays at 4:00, projected from dvd in Clark Art Institute auditorium. Admission to film programs at the Clark is always free. The complete schedule follows:
I. Hopping through the East:
January 14: Black Robe. (1991, 101 minutes.) Bruce Beresford directs Brian Moore’s adaptation of his novel about a Jesuit mission to the Huron Indians in the pristine wilderness of “New France” in 1634. Nature is the silent but sublime witness to this savage, shocking clash of civilizations.
January 21: The Yearling. (1946, 128 minutes.) Post-Civil War Florida is the on-location backdrop for this classic family story of a young boy’s love for a fawn. Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman star in Clarence Brown’s film of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel.
January 28: All That Heaven Allows. (1955, 89 minutes.) Rock Hudson is a landscape gardener and avatar of Thoreau (believe it or not!) who wins the heart of New England widow Jane Wyman, suffocated by suburbia, in Douglas Sirk’s brilliantly expressionistic melodrama.
II. Skipping into the Heartland:
February 25: Days of Heaven. (1978, 95 minutes.) Terrence Malick mixes stark terror and transcendent beauty in a wide-eyed depiction of farming on the Great Plains a hundred years ago, starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard. Shown with short, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, 25 min.).
March 4: Louisiana Story. (1948, 79 minutes.) Robert Flaherty’s exploration of bayou country was financed by Standard Oil, but resulted in a grand final masterpiece by the father of the documentary form. Shown with documentary short, The River (1937, 31 min.)
March 11: The Straight Story. (1999, 112 minutes.) Director David Lynch dials back his weirdness in this touching tale of an old man driving a lawnmower across Iowa to reconcile with his estranged brother. Richard Farnsworth stars, with superb support from Sissy Spacek and Harry Dean Stanton.
III. Jumping across the West:
April 8: Once Upon a Time in the West. (1968, 165 minutes.) The ultimate horse opera, the greatest Western of them all -- leave it to the Italians to sing the myth of the Wild West, in this breathtaking aria by Sergio Leone. Claudia Cardinale stars, along with Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Charles Bronson.
April 15: The Last Picture Show. (1971, 126 minutes.) The romance of the West is mostly played-out, on the barren windswept flatland of 1950’s Texas, in a stifling small town where a stellar ensemble cast looks for love and escape in Peter Bogdanovich’s masterful rendering of Larry McMurtry’s novel.
April 22: Thelma and Louise. (1991, 127 minutes.) The road beckons again in this latter-day buddy picture with a feminist twist. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis plunge into the wide open spaces of the modern West in Ridley Scott’s iconic tale of life on the run.
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