Artist Legacy Work on Film: The White Rose + Flying Lessons

Organized by Anthology Film Archives in partnership with Soft Network/AFELL and Noble Gas Media

Bruce Conner
THE WHITE ROSE
1967, 7 min, 35mm
A work born of Bruce Conner’s profound friendship with artist Jay DeFeo, THE WHITE ROSE captures the 1965 removal, from her first-floor San Francisco apartment, of DeFeo’s eponymous painting, a monumental work that she began in the late 1950s and worked on obsessively for eight years, eventually layering over two thousand pounds of paint onto the canvas. The intimate black and white film captures the fabled painting’s last moments in the apartment’s bay window recess, a space covered in chunks of paint as though an extension of the work, which Conner likened to a site-specific environment and “a temple”. Sutured by Conner’s sharp, rhythmic editing and set to music from Miles Davis’s album “Sketches of Spain”, THE WHITE ROSE is a tender document of artistic friendship, and an affectionate record of a key moment in Beat Generation art history.

Elizabeth Nichols
FLYING LESSONS
2024, 84 min, DCP
At a community meeting held to address their gentrifying landlord’s aggressive treatment of longtime tenants, filmmaker Elizabeth Nichols meets Philly Abe, an older punk artist who swiftly becomes the younger woman’s muse, attentive neighbor, and friend. While tracking Philly’s activism and struggles in the face of harassment, Nichols surfaces her life story through extraordinarily candid conversations, as well as a gloriously SD video archive of concert footage and DIY downtown New York films by the likes of Todd Verow and Mike Kuchar in which the fabulously brash Abe starred. The magnetic pull between artist and filmmaker yields something beguiling and precious, celebrating the fiery Philly even as she and the world she fought to protect are being actively extinguished.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Followed by a Q&A.