Gilles Bourdos’ Renoir is filmed as if you are living in Renoir’s Cagnes-sur-Mer, now a suburb of Nice, in the summer of 1915. Though Renoir was seriously ailing with rheumatoid arthritis and could scarcely hold a brush, among his pleasures was painting alfresco....
Wright’s Anna Karenina takes liberties by inventing a picnic that the screenplay by Tom Stoppard suggests is “a lovers’ idyll, by a stream on a warm day.” The picnic episode isn’t Tolstoy’s. As far as I know, there aren’t any...
In June 1939, FDR entertained King George VI and Queen Margaret at a picnic in Hyde Park, New York, his “other” White House. The picnic is significantly fictionalized. Michell and screenwriter Richard Nelson add much to the story but omit Eleanor...
Vogue Magazine staged an Edith Wharton picnic with photography by Annie Leibovitz and text by Colm Toibin. The picnic was photographed on the grounds of The Mount, Wharton’s home in Lennox, Massachusetts. See “The Custom of the Country: Vogue Re-creates...
![Susanna White’s Parade’s End (2012)]()
Christopher Tietjens’ life with his wife Sylvia is no picnic. There are ample instances of Sylvia’s inconstancy in his Parade’s End, but this picnic episode is not one of them. That’s why it seems likely that Susanna White and screenwriter Tom Stoppard added a picnic...
Gilliam’s Zero Theorem is a sexy, pleasantly ordinary picnic. Except it is virtual, taking place in Qohen’s computer program and placed there by his horrid boss to make him work, work, work. The picnic is a romp on the tropical beach with a virtual sex...
Chadwick’s picnic is perfunctory and idealized. Chadwick and his screenwriter William Nicolson liked the idea of a lovers’ picnic because the narrative needed a romantic interlude. Mandela’s autobiography does not mention a picnic during his...
Wardell Milan’s Sunday, Sitting on the Bank of Butterfly Meadow (2013) is an improvisation of Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, 1938. A visual joke, yes?
Joanna Hogg says that Archipelago is a metaphor for a family just out of touch with one another; “The title relates to the family as a group of islands, linked together beneath the surface. What often links a family together goes unspoken and unacknowledged. Families...
In the aftermath of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Nepal, Katmandu residents camped out in the open. At a glance, Price’s photograph seems to be a picnic. It is not. It’s a small segment of the chaos of disaster on what would otherwise be a glorious day....
