PARE LORENTZ

SPECIAL EVENT WITH LIVE ORCHESTRAL ACCOMPANIMENT

THE RIVER
1938, USA, 31 minutes, English

Pare Lorentz's landmark New Deal documentaries, produced by the US Resettlement Administration, will be screened with their classic Virgil Thomson scores performed live by Post-Classical Ensemble, Angel Gil-Ordóñez conducting.

The visual poetry of these famous films, created by such photographers and cameramen as Paul Strand, Ralph Steiner, Leo Hurwitz, Willard Van Dyke and Floyd Crosby, helped to define the social documentary for generations. As the gritty monaural soundtracks cannot do justice to Thomson's music-an organic feature of Lorentz's designs-these SILVERDOCS presentations furnish a unique opportunity to freshly experience two 30-minute documentaries classified by the Library of Congress as "American cinematic treasures."

Produced to justify FDR's program for aiding refugee families from areas devastated by natural disasters, THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS incorporates a history of the Great Plains from the first cattle drives to the punishing drought then entering its sixth year. Lorentz called it "a melodrama of nature-the tragedy of turning grass into dust."

THE RIVER traces the history of the Mississippi River and argues the necessity of a system of dams. Like THE PLOW, it celebrates American land and people.Thomson's score was called by Aaron Copland (whom it greatly influenced) "a lesson in how to treat Americana." Voted the best documentary at the 1938 Venice Film Festival (beating Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA), THE RIVER was nationally distributed by Paramount. Lorentz's script, a Whitmanesque free-verse poem called by James Joyce "the most beautiful prose that I have heard in ten years," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

With narration by Floyd King, and commentary by legendary documentary filmmaker George Stoney, composer Charles Fussell and NPR's Andy Trudeau; Joseph Horowitz, host.

Funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MARPAT Foundation, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, and the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation.

Print Source:

Saturday, June 11, 3:00 p.m. - 5 p.m.
And Sunday, June 12, 3:00 p.m. - 5 p.m.

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