Film Series at the Clark
The Clark Art Institute continues its five-part film series, Film and Art, into the fall season. The next offering will be O Horizon an experimental documentary that explores the environmental teachings of Bengali writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore.
The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), Tagore wrote novels, poems, short stories, musical dramas, dance dramas, songs and more. He was also a social reformer who cared deeply for the land.
It will be screened Thursday, September 29th, at 7:30 PM in the institute’s auditorium.
Next up will be Foragers on Thursday, October 13th, at 7:30 PM. In Foragers, director and producer Jumana Manna blends documentary and fiction to profile the age-old Palestinian practice of gathering wild edibles such as za’atar (thyme) and the delicacy ’akkoub. Israeli nature conservation laws have criminalized this indigenous tradition. The film presents a meditative portrait of the resistance, joy and deep ecological knowledge held by today’s foragers.
A post-film discussion with Williams College Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature Professor Amal Eqeiq and master’s students Max Gruber and Meghan Clare Considine follows. The presentation is free.
On Thursday, October 27th, at 6 PM the documentary Zurbarán and His Twelve Sons explores the meaning of a series of 13 canvases of Jacob and his 12 Sons painted by Francisco de Zurbarán in Seville around 1640. Learn how the canvases, probably commissioned for a cathedral in the Americas, disappeared for a century until they were acquired at auction by the London merchant James Mendez. A few years later in 1756 a significant gesture in support of English Jews was made by Bishop Richard Trevor of Durham who obtained the paintings and hung them in his dining room at Auckland Castle, where they have returned and remained.
Screenwriter John Healey introduces the free documentary.
Murs Murs, a kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate Los Angeles, created by Agnès Varda after returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, will be presented Thursday, November 10th, at 7:30PM. Bursting with color and vitality, Mur Murs is as much an invigorating study of community and diversity as it is an essential catalog of unusual public art.
The series ends Thursday, November 17th, with a screening of F for Fake at 7PM. In it Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan), gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes.
The Institute is located at 225 South Street, Williamstown MA; 413-458-2303.
