Tami Kennedy | 207-838-0816 | [email protected]

ASHFORD, CONNECTICUT (November 13, 2012) – Connecticut-based independent film makers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217 Films announce that their new film project — their fifth film since 2005 — will celebrate the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the 1913 Armory Show where many Americans had their first introduction to art that did not look like anything they had ever seen or ever expected to see.

The film will be titled “The Great Confusion: The 1913 Armory Show” and is scheduled for release in November 2013.

From February 15 until March 15, 1913, Americans pushed their way through the doors of an armory on the east side of New York City to confront “Modern Art” for the first time.  What they saw would annoy and infuriate some, and captivate, delight, and inspire many. What resulted from this four weeks of mass exposure to European artists such as Cezanne, Renoir, and Van Gogh, and to such Americans as Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler, changed how Americans came to understand their own times.  By entering through the doors of an armory, they entered through the doors of Modernism.

The most controversial work in this show was Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” which was famously derided by President Theodore Roosevelt in an essay written and published for the 1913 Armory Show. Julian Street, the art critic, likened Duchamp’s seminal work to “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

“The Great Confusion:  The 1913 Armory Show” will probe deeply into the history of how the show was organized, examine the critical organizational efforts of American artists such as Arthur B. Davies, Walter Pach, and Walt Kuhn, and will explore the impact that the show had on emerging artists, film makers, and writers who embraced the challenges to our perceptions of reality that they saw in 1913 and translated this new way of seeing into works honoring the creative spirit, which have changed the way that all of us answer the question, “What is art?”

More about 217 Films:  217 Films is an independent film company devoted to the American artistic experience.  In 2005, Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton released their first film “Cleophas and His Own” about the American painter Marsden Hartley’s epic narrative of love and loss. Maglaras both directed and played the role of Hartley in this film.  In 2008, they released a second film about Hartley called “Visible Silence:  Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet” – the first-ever documentary on the life of Hartley. In 2010, with their film “John Marin: Let the Paint be Paint!”they established, through the first full-length documentary on this important painter, that John Marin was one of the fathers of American Modernism. All three films, among other distinctions, have been shown to acclaim at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Their most recent film, “O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward” was released in 2012 and is currently on tour across the United States.

 The Sacramento Bee called Michael Maglaras a film maker of “Bergman-like gravitas.” His films have been described as “virtuoso filmmaking” (National Gallery of Art) “alive and fresh” (Art New England) and “elegiac and insightful” (Naples Daily News).  David Berona, author of “Wordless Books” has said of “O Brother Man” “This film is stunning.”

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