New Media Gallery, Fall 2007

Click on the exhibition title below to see dates and scheduled events. The "Read more" link under some listing provides additional information.

Films of Peter Whitehead
Within Our Gates
The Short Films of Alan Berliner

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New Media Gallery Programs

We inaugurate the second year of the Museum's New Media Gallery, thanks to the sponsorship of Crutchfield and the Virginia Film Festival.

		Peter Whitehead

Films of Peter Whitehead
July 3 - September 30

Four counter-culture films made in the 1960s are featured.

According to Dave Calhoun, writing in Time Out, “Whitehead was the greatest avant-garde British filmmaker of the Sixties. His films stand together as an unrivalled record of that decade's counter-culture”

The rotating schedule features four of Whitehead's remarkable films, which have been rediscovered and celebrated during an international tour over the past few years. Wholly Communion documents Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965; Benefit of the Doubt records Peter Brook directing his anti-Vietnam War play US, starring Glenda Jackson, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967; Tonite Let's All Make Love in London is an impressionistic view of the mod scene in London, with appearances by Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, and David Hockney, and music by Pink Floyd; and Charlie is my Darling is Whitehead's rarely screened documentary on Rolling Stonemania in England.

		Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates
by Oscar Micheaux
October 3 - November 2, 1 and 3 pm

African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made this 1920 silent film as a response to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and to oppose any defense of the Klan and lynching. The story focuses on an African American woman who goes North in an effort to help a Southern minister raise money to sustain a school for poor children. Her romance with a black doctor eventually leads to revelations about her family's past that expose the racial skeletons in America's closet. The film is shown in support of the Museum's programs Forming American Identities: Our Southern Legacy and scheduled in conjunction with the colloquium on September 30, 5:30 pm, in the Museum, on “Cinematic Representations” with Carmenita Higginbotham, assistant professor, McIntire Department of Art, and Jane Gaines, professor, Department of English, Duke University.

		Alan Berliner

The Short Films of Alan Berliner
November 3 - December 23

Berliner, whose films are featured in this year's Virginia Film Festival, is known primarily for his experimental variations on the “home movie,” such as Family Album and Nobody's Business. He is also acclaimed for his astonishing editing skills, which are on full display in the early short films collected for this program, including Everywhere at Once (1985) and City Edition (1980).