Painters Painting

March 1–April 28, 2019

Inspired by BAMPFA’s Hans Hofmann retrospective, we screen a selection of exceptional films about painters and painting, from Van Gogh to Basquiat, Giotto to Joan Mitchell.

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  • Van Gogh

  • The Mystery of Picasso

  • Downtown 81

  • Edvard Munch

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter

    • Sunday, April 28 2 PM
    Marion Cajori
    United States, 1993

    Cajori’s elliptical and intimate portrait offers a rare chance to hear from painter Joan Mitchell, who created an eloquent vocabulary of abstract gesture, color, and light. With Jem Cohen’s Anne Truitt, Working and Bruce Conner’s The White Rose.

  • The Quince Tree Sun

    • Sunday, April 7 5 PM
    Víctor Erice
    Spain, 1992

    New 4K Digital Restoration

    Victor Erice (Spirit of the Beehive) creates an exquisite portrait of the Spanish realist painter Antonio López García, expanding his attempts to paint a single quince tree into a treatise on light, the creative process, and the passage of time.

  • The Decameron

    • Friday, March 29 7 PM
    Pier Paolo Pasolini
    Italy, 1971

    Pasolini plays the painter Giotto in this ribald yet rigorous film weaving together a selection of Boccaccio’s classic tales. “One of the most beautiful, turbulent and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film” (New York Times).

  • The Mystery of Picasso

    • Friday, March 1 7 PM
    • Saturday, March 9 5:30 PM
    • Sunday, March 24 2 PM
    Henri-Georges Clouzot
    France, 1956

    New Digital Restoration

    Film to Table dinner follows the March 9 screening

    Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, this colorful documentary glimpse of the seventy-five-year-old Picasso captures the fecund nature of his creative process. “One of the most exciting and joyful movies ever made” (Pauline Kael).

  • Edvard Munch

    • Friday, March 22 7 PM
    Peter Watkins
    Sweden, Norway, 1974

    This portrait of the painter is “the standard by which all subsequent films of artists’ lives will be measured” (New Yorker Films). “In the end the paintings do Munch’s talking for him, both directly and through the prefigurations and echoes in the film’s set pieces” (Time Out).

  • Downtown 81

    • Saturday, March 16 5:30 PM
    Edo Bertoglio
    United States, 1981/2000

    Jean-Michel Basquiat plays a fictionalized version of himself in this gritty urban fairytale, a glimpse of New York’s early-eighties Lower East Side in all its blighted, bohemian glory. With appearances by James White and the Blacks, DNA, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and more.

  • Painters Painting

    • Friday, March 15 4 PM
    Emile de Antonio
    United States, 1973

    Eminent documentarian de Antonio surveys the New York art scene circa 1970 via studio visits and conversations with preeminent artists, critics, dealers, and collectors, including Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.

  • Van Gogh

    • Sunday, March 3 3 PM
    Maurice Pialat
    France, 1991

    Imported 35mm Print

    The artist’s world in the last two months of his life is drawn with period feeling harking back to the Impressionists. “An extraordinary portrait of the artist as common man” (Sight & Sound).