The picnic scene is not Ford’s. It is the creation of White and Stoppard to demonstrate that Christopher’s excruciating relationship with Sylvia is no picnic. In episode 2 of the series, Christopher and Sylvia spend a country week with and attend a picnic on the grass...
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?
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 are a...
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....
Amory Clay, the central character, describes a solitary picnic for herself. She is recovering from childbirth trauma. A healthy baby suddenly dies. Amory is depressed, but one day she takes a moment to find solace. “Today was one of those weird Mediterranean moments...
For six hours and 17 minutes, Tom Harper’s War and Peace is a parade of armies marching or in battle, explosions, mutilations, death, love and seduction, incest, and constant social intrigue. The final 2:8 minutes is a picnic, a happy situation, if not a fairy tale...
When Philip Ashley suggests a picnic to his cousin Rachel, she responds, “If we are to picnic by the sea or sail a boat,” she told me, “I will not come with you. It is too early in the year to sit upon a beach, and as for climbing in a boat, I know even less about...
For the picnic, Victoria, and Abdul, Stephen Frears jokes that it is typically English and glum. Unwilling to be put off by an oncoming thunderstorm, cold, and wind, Victoria insists on picnicking amid heath. It’s uncomfortably cold, and Victoria and fellow picnickers...
Mixing fact with fiction, Danièle Thompson (very) loosely retells the complex friendship of Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne in Cézanne et Moi, especially how Cezanne helped Zola see from a painter’s point of view. Though they were childhood friends in Aix and later...
There are two picnics in Gerwig’s Little Women: a wedding picnic and a beach picnic. The first is Meg March and Mr. Brook’s reception. As in Alcott’s novel, it’s “a plentiful lunch of cake and fruit, dressed in flowers.” But Gerwig’s foods include wine, lemonade, and...
Sergio Aragonés’s comic imagination upends a happy picnic. Featured Image: Sergio Aragonés’s “Crime Scene Picnic.” 3, 2018.
This is a protest picnic in plague-time. It features two masked picnickers toasting one another with Molotov cocktails. MAD is a street artist from Tabriz, Iran. Featured Image: Picnic.Hand-Stencil on Prolux 300gsm Base Paper
There are two picnics, both occurring about the same time in 1946. One concerns the Watson’s and the other the Hewett’s. Both picnics are bittersweet and end with unhappy consequences. The Watson family celebrates the Fourth of July by attending a family picnic. It’s...
Beer and apples. Featured Image: Luncheon on the Pasture, acrylic on canvas.
For all we know, Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s chef on the Pourquoi Pas! Used this recipe for Crêpes Suzette when the crew celebrated Mardi Gras in Antarctica (1909). 2450— SUZETTE PANCAKES Make these from preparation A, flavoured with cura9oa and tangerine juice....
Campion’s narrative sets the picnic episode on a mild sunny day in late summer. The locale is flat plains and brown grass. In the distance, high mountains loom. Beyond which high mountains loom. George Burbank is like the landscape he inhabits, solid and...
Abell’s The Melody That Got Lost is a surrealistic drama with music that severely critiques modern conformity to middle-class values and the insipid qualities of middle-class imagination with a picnic filled with trash. The picnic scene begins when a typically...
McGinnis’s’ Blind Faith is dramatized reportage of a New Jersey murder case in which Rob Marshall was accused of hiring hitmen to free himself to marry his flamboyant mistress. According to McGuiness, when Marshall thought something was wrong with one of...
