Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of Ashford, Connecticut return to Norwalk Community College to screen their new film project – their seventh in twelve years and their sixth “essay in film” – highlighting works from what Mark Twain described as “The Gilded Age.”
The film is titled America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age and will screen at Norwalk Community College on Thursday, October 19 at 6:30 PM as part of its Movies-of-the-Month free film series.
Clips from the film can be viewed at this link: https://vimeo.com/two17films
Featuring the only known film footage of Mark Twain, who gave “The Gilded Age” its name, America Rising tells the story of how, after the Civil War, American art and American artists came into their own on the world stage. In painting, in sculpture, in architecture, and in music, America found its artistic soul and voice in the art created during the explosion of American economic growth, which Mark Twain wrote about in his novel, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.”
Using more than 90 works of art, featuring painters as diverse as Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, and John Singer Sargent, and with the great public sculpture of creative geniuses such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial” (referred to in the film by Director Maglaras as “the finest piece of memorial sculpture in America”), “America Rising” creates a portrait of a country reinventing itself, after the tragic events of the Civil War, as a major artistic force. “America Rising” shows an America poised, through its art, to commemorate its past and invent its future.
This film has been called “mesmerizing and wondrous” by Trent Nicholas at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and “a brilliant, creative combination of sounds and images…a tour de force” by Richard Friswell, editor of ARTES Magazine.
WHAT: Screening of 217 Films’ America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age
Connecticut filmmakers, director Michael Maglaras and executive producer Terri Templeton, will introduce the film and take questions following the screening.
WHEN:
Thursday, October 19
6:30 PM
WHERE:
Norwalk Community College
PepsiCo Theater on NCC’s East Campus
188 Richards Ave.
Norwalk, Connecticut
COST: Free and open to the public
About 217 Films: 217 Films is an independent film company located in Ashford, Connecticut. “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age” is the seventh film by director Michael Maglaras and executive producer Terri Templeton.
In twelve years of filmmaking, and by employing a concept which he originated – the idea of an “essay in film” – Maglaras has asked us to stop, look, appreciate and recognize the importance of our collective American cultural life through films about artists as diverse as Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Lynd Ward, and events such as the world-changing 1913 Armory Show and the arts of the American Depression.
Maglaras and Templeton hold the distinction of having been invited to present four of their films at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where the Director of Film, Peggy Parsons, has described their work as “virtuoso filmmaking.”
The Sacramento Bee called Maglaras a filmmaker of “Bergman-like gravitas.” His films have been described as “alive and fresh” (Art New England) “elegiac and insightful” (Naples Daily News)“unforgettable” (Journal of American History) and “comparable to that of the widely acclaimed Ken Burns” (New Britain Herald).
