Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the Fine Arts Theatre in downtown Asheville will screen two classic films directed by BMC alumnus Arthur Penn.
On Thursday, July 12, the theater will screen Penn’s revolutionary “Bonnie and Clyde”, which is credited with creating the genre of hyper-violent, morally ambiguous films which later appeared throughout the 1970s. In the film, then little-known actors Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star as two star-crossed lovers on a doomed crime spree across Depression-era America. They’re young, they’re in love, they kill people.
On Thursday, July 26, the museum and theater will screen “Alice’s Restaurant” from 1969. This film, based on the song by Arlo Guthrie and starring the musician as himself, captures the essence of late 1960s counter-culture.
The films will be preceded by a short talk on Arthur Penn’s legacy in American film, rooted in his experiences at Black Mountain College, a progressive school once located in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Neal Reed, Mitch Hampton and Kate Averett will offer a post-film discussion.
In a 1998 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Penn said he had finished military service in Europe and was in New York in the late 1940s when he heard about Black Mountain College and decided to enroll.
“It interested me because so many of the people who had been in the Bauhaus in Germany, had, as refugees, come to the United States.” They couldn’t get jobs at American universities, “but a number of them settled there at Black Mountain, and taught there, because it was not accredited and they could get a job… It was an extraordinary place… You sat together, you ate together, you lived together. We were all good friends.”
He said he was friends at Black Mountain with painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Ken Noland, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, future renowned architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, and writer Isaac Rosenfeld.
Reflecting on his efforts working on a stage production at the school, he said he was tasked with helping Fuller overcome stage fright.
What he came up with, he said he later realized, was “basic, method, improvisational exercise, of rolling on the floor, being as ridiculous and ludicrous as you could be.”
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center preserves and continues the legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College.
The museum was founded in 1993 to celebrate the history of Black Mountain College as a forerunner in progressive interdisciplinary education and to explore its extraordinary impact on modern and contemporary art, dance, theater, music, and performance.
The Fine Arts Theater is located at 36 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville.
Tickets for either screening are available through the Fine Arts Theatre Box Office: http://9850.formovietickets.com:2235/ or call (828) 232-1536
$8 for BMCM+AC members + students w/ID / $10 for non-members.