Rebels, romance, and revolution: Hollywood classics return to the big screen in Tel Aviv

America’s most famous outlaws on the run, bikers searching for the American dream, and a recent college grad who falls into an affair all grace the screen at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from October 22-24, when its Americana cinema weekend brings American movies of the 1960s and 70s back to the big screen.

There is also a television program.

Inspired by the museum’s exhibition Tom Wesselmann: Big, the program combines screenings with talks, encounters, and exhibition tours, exploring the connections between pop art and a generation of filmmakers who created a new Hollywood.

Karin Rivkind Segal is the artistic director, and Tamar Sofer is the museum’s programming director.

Wesselmann’s art features images of bodies, consumer goods, and advertising, creating a portrait of an America changing nearly every realm.

The films offer different perspectives on that same society, spotlighting the unease beneath its prosperity and the contradictions of the movements promising liberation.

Two 1967 films helped announce the arrival of a new Hollywood: Mike Nichols’s The Graduate and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, who has achieved great academic success but has no idea what he wants to do next and feels drained.

His affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, who was just six years older than Hoffman – the movie did not challenge all Hollywood conventions), a friend of his parents, and his attraction to her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), unfolds against a backdrop of suburban luxury to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel.

The movie is credited with one of the best and most innovative uses of contemporary songs on a soundtrack.

Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, turns Depression-era bank robbers into alluring, doomed rebels. Its opening close-up of Dunaway’s lips provides one of the program’s visual links to Wesselmann, whose work repeatedly returns to that motif.

The supporting cast includes two Genes – Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder. The bloody climax is one of the most influential sequences in all of cinema.

Dennis Hopper, who would have turned 90 this year, directed and starred alongside Peter Fonda in Easy Rider (1969).

The motorcycle journey of these two cocaine dealers, who have made a big score and are searching for the American dream, with Jack Nicholson joining them along the way, was a runaway hit, set to a pulsing soundtrack of rock anthems, including “Born to Be Wild” and “The Weight.”

The highlight of the film is Nicholson’s performance as a former football hero from a powerful family whose dreams have gone sour, and it turned him from a character actor into a major star.

The rest of the film, besides a few scattered sequences, such as an LSD-infused stop in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, doesn’t hold up as well, but it’s worth seeing for film buffs.

Gimme Shelter (1970), directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, following the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour, was one of the most fascinating and newsworthy documentaries of the era.

It showcased the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont that turned violent, and examined how the hippie dream of Woodstock turned so dark just a year later. Film lecturer and editor Tami Liberman will introduce the screening.

Politics moves into the foreground in a double bill pairing Robert Drew’s Faces of November (1963), a wordless film capturing images of mourners at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, with Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969).

Wexler placed a fictional television cameraman (Robert Forster) into the actual upheaval surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, blurring the boundary between drama and documentary.

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) offers an eerily prescient vision of how technology and authority can collaborate to rob people of their privacy.

Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who begins to fear that the couple he has been hired to spy on will be murdered.

The supporting cast includes Cindy Williams, who went on to star in Laverne and Shirley; John Cazale, who appeared in the first two Godfather films, The Deer Hunter and Dog Day Afternoon; and Harrison Ford, who would soon be cast in Star Wars.

Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), marking its 55th anniversary, looks back to a fading Texas town in the early 1950s.

Starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd, it follows the disillusionment of both the older and younger generations, and made its director one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers.

Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) centers on another exploration of a changing America, as a widowed mother travels with her son while trying to pursue a singing career.

Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar for her performance, and Kris Kristofferson and Harvey Keitel gave great performances as the men in her life. Kfir Meir, assistant to the curator of Israeli art, will give an introductory lecture.

Jim Sharman’s musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) became a cult classic which broke taboos and conventions about how gay and trans characters could be portrayed on screen. Before the screening, which is restricted to ages 16 and older, Sofer will give a talk.

Television joins the program with Mad (Wo)Men, an event featuring the “Babylon” and “The Hobo Code” episodes from the first season of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. Exhibition curator Shahar Molcho will introduce the episodes, which trace Peggy Olson’s (Elisabeth Moss) transformation from a secretary to major advertising talent.

Participants will also have exclusive access to the Wesselmann exhibition before and after the screening.

The films and television episodes are presented in English with Hebrew subtitles.

For the full schedule and tickets, visit the Tel Aviv Museum of Art website at https://www.tamuseum.org.il/he/cinema-weekend-at-the-museum/