Date and Time
- Thursday, Jul 23, 2026 6pm - 9pm
Location
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 3rd St
Details
In resonance with Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal, San Francisco Cinematheque presents A Thing Brilliant and Powerful, a program of films on paint, painting, and paintings, films of exuberant gesture and explosions of color, and works that consider the ethics of representation and exhibition. Stephanie Barber’s 3 Peonies (2027) is a single-shot sacrificial still life. Cauleen Smith’s epistolary rumination Entitled (2008) also considers the politics of the still life in a sextet of missives to the Old Masters, from Vermeer to Velázquez to Charles Ethan Porter. Dad’s Stick (2012) by John Smith is an elegiac ode to accidental abstraction, while The Or Cloud (2001) by Fred Worden — an “adventure for the eyeballs” — is a rushing, black-and-white “stream of articulated energy.” The program also includes a revival digital video screening of Work (1993), Pelle Lowe’s full-frontal Super-8 send up of Olympia — the 1863 painting by Édouard Manet that scandalized Paris four decades before Femme au chapeau — starring filmmaker Saul Levine as the recumbent and wisecracking object of desire. Closing the show is Stan Brakhage & Phil Solomon’s Elementary Phrases (1994), a silently explosive abstract epic in which Brakhage’s bold paint-on-film brushstrokes are meticulously modulated by master printer Solomon.
This program is dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Fred Worden (1946–2025).
Please note: This screening includes mature content.
