Antonia is the matriarch of an extended family: her daughter, child, and partner, her friends, and castoffs who need a home. Each year, a long table is set in the barnyard for the extended family to picnic. See Marleen Gorris. Antonia’s Line (1995). Screenplay by...
Allison McKenzie and Norman Page teenagers ride bicycles to a picnic on the Connecticut River. Metalious’s picnic is similar to Carson McCullers’s in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; during which Mick Kelly and Harry Minowitz talk about adult life and...
Leger’s style is unmistakable and memorable. Partie de Campagne, a series variously translated as The Picnic or The Country Outing, is a series of variations, and part of a project he called the Great Parade. As lithographs, these were among Léger s most...
Jhabvala’s “Picnic with Moonlight and Mangos” from How I Became a Holy Mother (1976) is about the picnic in the garden of Moti Bagh, a 17th-century palace in a suburb of New Delhi. This annual event is often an excuse for drunken behavior and sexual liaisons. The...
Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma! is an adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! (1943) is an adaptation of Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). Hammerstein wrote one (Act 2) to intensify the rivalry between Curly McClain and...
Dmytryk’s picnic is a traditional affair on the rocky ledge of the Shawmucky River: a blanket, food, and a demijohn of corn liquor. It begins happily and ends with a kiss. The day’s happiness is a prelude to John Shawnessey’s love affair and unfortunate marriage to...
As they should, Day’s illustrations for The Teddy Bears’ Picnic emphasize a picnic where the bears are stocked with honey, bananas, pears, oranges, cake, soda, jellybeans, marshmallows, and chips. Inexplicably included are garlands of red peppers and garlic. See...
Lampedusa wanted the picnic in The Leopard to be a metaphor for Don Fabrizio’s outward pleasant condition masking his inward and disillusionment. Visconti wishes it to be a respite on a long dusty ride. Lampedusa describes a “funereal countryside, yellow...
Varda’s satirical idea is that family happiness depends on male arrogance and female docility. She suggests that if wives are replaceable, a man can lose one and plug in another. Voila, happiness. François Chevaliers supposes that a husband needs a mistress to...
Bearden transports Omar Khayyám’s Persia to the Tropics for his take on “Quatrain XI” from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. But the man is Persian and the woman is black. Though the poem suggests sensuality, Bearden presents the poet clothed but the woman naked, except...
