Simic’s “Night Picnic” defies picnic expectations. Instead of daylight, there is a very dark vast starless sky. Instead of romancing or jollity, a man and woman sit on the grass without communicating. The narrator finds it slightly ironic that they...
Pantell’s painting Backyards is an urban scene behind the street façade. He finds a family sitting at a picnic table among the things he sees. The trees are bare in either early spring or late fall. But the hearty picnickers are taking in the city air in their meager...
Marsh’s Dead Babies, Mood Swingers in the U.S., is a satire of a picnic disaster. If this satire is meant to be crude, it succeeds admirably. If satire aims to amuse, Dead Babies fails miserably. Ditto Martin Amis’s novel on which the film is based. The...
Harper’s archery picnic is faithful (more or less) to George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda. It’s a picnic archery meeting for women only. Elliot uses the sport as a metaphor for gender relationships. Archery is a variation of the goddess Diana hunting, except here, the...
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the hold on “official” artistic imagination produced many satires. Among them, Dubosarsky and Vinogradov’s Luncheon on the Grass reverses rigidity and social realism and embraces sexuality and lascivious behavior for the fun of it....
Altman’s fall shooting party and lunch in Gosford Park is a metaphor for social rot in English aristocracy and their servants circa 1932. The pheasant hunt takes place on a cold rainy day in October at which the lord of the manner, Sir William McCordle, brutally...
Von Hellermann’s When he came. . . is a feminist complaint about male attitudes and a woman’s compliance? The concept is an allusion to Méret Oppenheim’s Le Festin (1959), a Surrealist banquet set on a nude woman’s body. Oppenheim originally...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
Dworzak’s picnic in Grozny, Chechnya, is disconcerting. Chechen men having a picnic in a bombed-out neighborhood near Minutka Square. See Thomas Dworzak’s Ruins of Chechnya (2002). Magnum Photos. Compare this George Allen Warner’s picnic in The Rubbish Dump (1955)...
