Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum / Easy Rider, 1969

Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum | A rich weekend of films inspired by the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: All Out / From the Marie and Jose Mugrabi Collection.
Artistic Director: Karin Rywkind Segal

The screenings will be accompanied by introductions from the Museum’s curators and guest lecturers.

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Easy Rider

USA, 1969 | Director: Dennis Hopper | Cast: Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson | 95 min., English with Hebrew subtitles

After a lucrative cocaine deal, two hippies—Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper)—set off on their Harley-Davidsons on a cross-country journey in search of freedom, meaning, and perhaps America itself. Yet as they travel, the country they set out to find gradually dissolves amid the landscapes, violence, and alienation they encounter along the way. Their journey introduces them to a cross-section of American society, including the unforgettable George Hanson, a small-town lawyer memorably portrayed by a young Jack Nicholson. In his directorial debut, Hopper transforms the road trip into a cinematic manifesto for a generation determined to reject social and political conventions in search of alternative ways of living.

Since its release, Easy Rider has become one of the defining road movies in American cinema. An exhilarating cinematic experience, it combines an iconic rock soundtrack, László Kovács’s sweeping cinematography, breathtaking American landscapes, and a psychedelic journey culminating in an LSD sequence. The result is a film about the pursuit of freedom, an America in transition, and, above all, the heavy price of choosing to live beyond the boundaries of convention.

Easy Rider and Tom Wesselmann’s work emerged from the same America of the 1960s, yet they approach it from strikingly different perspectives. While Wesselmann explores the American Dream through the imagery of consumer culture and material abundance, Hopper takes to the open road in search of an escape from that very world, only to encounter its values and at every turn. In both, the defining images of postwar American culture—freedom, sexuality, abundance, and self-fulfillment—recur as objects of desire while acknowledging the costs of pursuing them.

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The exhibition Tom Wesselmann: All Out, currently on view at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, provides the point of departure for a weekend film program devoted to America in the 1960s and 1970s. Wesselmann’s work emerged from a visual culture saturated with images of the body, advertising, and consumerism, at a moment when American society was undergoing profound social and cultural change. The program expands the exhibition’s perspective through a selection of films that capture the spirit of the era: the counterculture; growing skepticism toward institutions and authority; shifting ideas about sexuality, femininity, and gender; the struggle for civil rights; and the social and political critique that defined the years of the Vietnam War.

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Note: Film introductions will be in Hebrew.
The number of participants is limited | Advance reservations are required for all participants.
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For more information on “Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum” and the full screening program >

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Image: © 1969 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment