Authors

Richard I. Suchenski, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Center for Moving Image Arts, Bard College; and editor, Hou Hsiao-hsien. In this lecture recorded on September 3, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Richard I. Suchenski discusses his book, Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film—an exploration of innovative cinematic works that use their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination through which currents from the other arts can flow. By examining these works, Projections of Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify cinema as a twentieth-century art form. Suchenski addresses some of the core concerns of the book through a discussion of films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Jean-Luc Godard alongside paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Matthias Grünewald.

Sally Mann, artist. In this presentation recorded on June 21, 2015, at the National Gallery of Art, acclaimed photographer Sally Mann reads from her revealing memoir and family history Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South is described as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs, she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." Mann crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel, but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

David McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author and recipient of the National Book Award, discusses his new book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. In this video recorded on September 26, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art, McCullough tells the story of America's longstanding love affair with Paris through vivid portraits of dozens of significant characters. Notably, artist Samuel F. B. Morse is depicted as he worked on his masterpiece Gallery of the Louvre. McCullough spoke at the Gallery in honor of the exhibition A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse's "Gallery of the Louvre," on view from June 25, 2011 to July 8, 2012. The exhibition, program, and video were coordinated with and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.