The Garden Theatre will welcome Princeton University alum Philip Hartman ’77 back to town to screen his recently restored 1986 film, No Picnic, on Saturday, August 8, at 4 p.m. Hartman will introduce the movie and take part in a post-screening Q&A.
No Picnic premiered at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival and won the award for Best Cinematography. It eventually played at Anthology Film Archive in New York in 1990 where Manhola Dargis, the current chief film critic for the New York Times, saw the film and wrote then for the Village Voice that No Picnic was the “one movie about the East Village that gets it right.”
After having been rarely screened during the last 36 years, No Picnic is enjoying a rediscovery. The Film Desk, whose mission is “to introduce, or reintroduce, international classics to audiences,” oversaw a 4K restoration of the movie and premiered it earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art. It has just come off a successful 12-week run at the Film Forum in New York.
When Hartman was a student at Princeton University in the mid-1970s he co-founded the Princeton University Film Society, which not only screened important repertory and contemporary titles for the community but supported students in their own filmmaking endeavors.
“We’re trying to convince the University that there’s enough interest to start a film-making course,” Hartman told the Daily Princetonian in 1974.
The Film Society saw themselves as part of a broader movement in filmmaking, taking their cue from New Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich. Hartman, who was also a contributor to the Daily Princetonian, wrote in 1975 that the Film Society was “attempting to piece together the story of the young American cinema” by screening films not just by the so-called American New Wave but those of the Old Hollywood as well, even hosting the legendary Frank Capra in Princeton for a retrospective of his work.
The Princeton Garden Theatre is at 160 Nassau Street. Tickets are available at the box office or online at princetongardentheatre.org/films/no-picnic.