Morelia International Film Festival

Guests 2007

Arthur Penn

(Philadelphia, EUA, 1922)

Born in Philadelphia (1922), he grew up in New York and Philadelphia. He first appeared on stage in high school, and also worked as a radio announcer. He became a soldier in 1943/44 and served as an infantryman during the battle of Ardennes. In 1945/46 he became a member of an army theatre troupe performing in Wiesbaden and Paris. He took up studies in philosophy and psychology at the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1947, later continuing his studies in Perugia and Florence. He was a television intern in 1951, and made his debut as a television director in 1953. He married the actress Peggy Maurer in 1955 and in 1958 he made his cinematic debut with the Gore Vidal adaptation The Left-Handed Gun. He was an advisor to John F. Kennedy prior to his television debates with Richard Nixon. He received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director in 1963 for The Miracle Worker. Further nominations for Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and Alice’s Restaurant (1970) followed. These two works and Little Big Man are among some of Penn’s most successful films. Since his Broadway debut in 1959, Penn has often worked as a stage director. He was involved in the Actor’s Studio in the 1970s becoming its president in the early 90s. He lives in New York.

*Taken from the 57 Berlinale Catalog

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During the 60’s and 70’s Arthur Penn was a key figure in American cinema. This was a time when those in favor of the medium were beginning to leave the beaten track in search of new subjects and ways of portraying them. Penn was one of the protagonists of this new cinematic departure; his films were to become a chronicle of another America. Penn was interested in alternatives to middle-class existence: gangs of youthful criminals in The Left-Handed Gun and Bonnie and Clyde, but also the hippy commune of Alice’s Restaurant all represented communities that offered a haven for adolescent heroes who were no longer able to find their place in the world at large. This search for identity, and the use of violence as a means of garnering attention, was to become a central theme in Penn’s work. His films also demonstrate the way ideals and dreams are corrupted by reality.

Penn used historical objects to look at the political and social realities of contemporary America. The massacre of Indians by General Custer’s cavalry in Little Big Man reminded film critics of the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at the hands of American marines; the prisoner who is shot dead beside the sheriff in The Chase reminded them of the murder of Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; in the gangster couple Bonnie and Clyde they saw not so much the historical desperados of the 1930s as members of a younger generation in the sixties who were desperate to rid themselves of paternalism – both at state level and within their own families. Penn had a consummate seismographic ability to gauge the political, social and cultural mood of the time; he possessed an almost juvenile sensibility enabling him to capture societal change and upheaval in his films.

by Robert Muller

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