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Take a close look into the life and influence of photographer Dorothea Lange through historic, archival documentaries. Included are a documentary produced towards the end of Lange’s prolific life and films made with the support of the US Farm Securities Administration during the New Deal. These titles highlight legacies of recorded cultural histories and long-present social issues. Programmed in conjunction with the photography exhibition Dorothea Lange: Seeing People.
The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, 2 p.m.
These two classic American film titles, produced by the Farm Securities Administration, have become synonymous with the New Deal. Director Pare Lorentz credited Dorothea Lange and some of her photo captions of migrants when he wrote, “Blown out, baked out and broke. No place to go and no place to stop” in the script for his first film, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, 16mm to digital, 28 minutes), a portrait of desperation in the dustbowl of the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Lorentz’s The River chronicles the exploration and exploitation of the Mississippi River from the Civil War through the 1920s (1938, 16mm to digital, 31 minutes).
Dorothea Lange: Under the Trees and The Closer for Me, 3:30 p.m.
Produced for National Educational Television, this two-part documentary portrait of artist Dorothea Lange was filmed towards the end of her life and originally broadcast posthumously in 1965. Examining her lifetime’s work in preparation for a retrospective exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, part one, Under the Trees, highlights Lange’s life and career, her soul-searching, and her philosophy as a photographer. Part two, The Closer for Me, focuses on an unrealized project Lange was undertaking at the time of her death; the artist was planning on working with a new generation of photographers in developing some of the key ideas from her time working for the Farm Securities Administration during the Great Depression. (Robert Katz and Philip Greene, 1965, 16mm to digital, 60 minutes in total)
Free. Registration required.
