It was 16 years ago when we screened our first film, Cleophas and His Own; which focused on world- renowned artist, Marsden Hartley. Audiences were spellbound, and so were the critics.
Peggy Parsons, Director of Film at the National Gallery of Art described it this way: “Virtuoso filmmaking in a rare and beautiful hybrid…Cleophas and His Own holds the viewer spellbound from start to finish.”
It is with great pride that we once again share this film with a live audience.
On Sunday, July 25 at 1:00pm the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida is hosting a special screening of this film onsite at the museum.
Full details are at this link.
More About the Film: Some of Hartley’s most notable works were created in Berlin, which was under the rule of Paragraph 175, deeming homosexuality a criminal act that snared tens of thousands of men. Despite these draconian laws, Hartley was able to create notable homages to one of the great loves of Hartley’s life, Karl von Freyburg, a young German officer who was killed in battle at the beginning of World War I. Later in life, this time in rural Maine, Hartley once again faced a tragic loss; the drowning death of the young fisherman Alty Mason, with whom Hartley was in love. The grief-stricken artist completed Cleophas and His Own, a poem dedicated to the young Mason and his family. The film presents Hartley (played by Maglaras) seated in his makeshift studio in Corea in 1943 where, tired and ill, he recounts a tragic story to an unseen visitor of the sad fate that befell the Francis Mason family: a family of farmers and fishermen with whom he lived on a remote island in Nova Scotia seven years before. Using Hartley’s text in its entirety and preserving the poem’s thirteen-chapter structure, the film uses flashbacks and employs 24 of Hartley’s paintings and drawings to tell of the events leading up to and following the Atlantic hurricane of September 19, 1936, when Hartley lost the young man who had become the love of his life. JULY 25, 1pm ONSITE AT THE MFA Free with museum admission
