Part of Amos Vogel Centenary: “Reality” as a Subversive Art
Sunday, October 31, 2021, 3:00 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

Dir. Jim McBride. 1971, 93 mins. 35mm. “Unaccountably disregarded by critics, this is a poisoned idyll of two young people in an America destroyed by atomic war: turnpikes overgrown by weeds, nomads living off the debris, travelling con-men ironically hawking fragments of a lost civilization, and the unbearable search for a new beginning. Particularly moving is a silent, real-time sequence in which an old man and a youth stare out at an ocean sunset, looking for a non-existent answer. A paraphrase of the counterculture's sensibilities, the film's subversive potential lies in its straightforward acceptance and naturalistic portrayal of the destructibility of eternal American symbols; a destroyed Howard Johnson's restaurant is more difficult to take than newspaper articles warning about the dangers of atomic war.”