Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum / The Last Picture Show, 1971

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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The Last Picture Show

USA, 1971 | Director: Peter Bogdanovich | Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd | 118 min., English with Hebrew subtitles

Sonny and Duane, two close friends in their final year of high school, come of age in a dying Texas town in the early 1950s. Duane (Jeff Bridges), the town’s popular football star, dates the beautiful and wealthy Jacy (Cybill Shepherd, in her screen debut), while the more introspective Sonny embarks on an affair with the coach’s wife. As graduation approaches, both young men struggle to imagine a future beyond the town’s slow decline. Based on Larry McMurtry’s novel—co-adapted by the author himself—Peter Bogdanovich’s landmark coming-of-age film is a deeply moving portrait of small-town America and of the compromises and disappointments that accompany the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, who embraced the innovations of the French New Wave, Bogdanovich looked instead to the traditions of classical Hollywood cinema. Through Robert Surtees’s luminous black-and-white cinematography and a restrained narrative style, he created a film that seems to belong to an earlier era. Yet beneath its classical surface lies a profoundly unsentimental vision. Rather than indulging in nostalgia, The Last Picture Show chronicles the slow disintegration of a community and a way of life—a decline poignantly symbolized by the closing of the town’s only movie theater.

The film returns to the America of the early 1950s: a world of automobiles, diners, movie theaters, and desires concealed beneath a veneer of social respectability, on the eve of the cultural upheavals that would transform American society in the decade to come. In this sense, it evokes the cultural landscape from which Tom Wesselmann’s artistic language would also emerge: an America defined by material abundance, an expanding consumer culture, and a sexuality poised between repression and liberation—forces that would soon occupy the center of American art and culture.

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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: © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of FilmBank