The Films of David Gordon Green - Harvard Film Archive

March 9 - 10

Dreaming on the Margins: The Films of David Gordon Green

Since his brilliant debut with George Washington (2000), David Gordon Green (b. 1975) has finally earned his reputation as one of the most talented filmmakers to emerge from the new American independent film scene. A child of the South, Green was born in Arkansas, raised in Texas, and studied film at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he honed his trademark Southern Gothic style.

Green’s films are steeped in the rhythms of Southern life, coupled with a poetic lyricism that distances him from the ironic sensibility and Gen-Y affectations of his contemporaries. Instead, Green favors a nuanced, observational style that recalls the cinema of Robert Altman and Terrence Malick, to whom he is ofen compared. Indeed, like Malick, Green favors elliptical narrative and dialogue, a mode of filmmaking that depends more on mood and image than on story, and a delivers a strong sense of place, especially the natural environment.

Distinguished by their stunning cinematography and contemplative dialogue, Green's films focus on the transition from innocence to understanding, with characters who straddle the divide between childhood and adulthood, struggling to achieve emotional maturity through a growing understanding of their relationship to the world around them. The Harvard Film Archive is proud to welcome David Gordon Green for a sneak preview screening of his new film, Snow Angels.

Sunday March 9 at 3pm

All the Real Girls

Directed by David Gordon Green.
With Zooey Deschanel, Paul Schneider, Patricia Clarkson
US 2003, 35mm, color, 108 min.

Zooey Deschanel delivers her breakout role as a young woman returning from boarding school to her small home town, where she falls in love for the first time. Green depicts the tentative courtship between Paul (Schneider) and Noel (Deschanel) in a series of beautifully filmed vignettes interspersed with scenes of day to day life in a small mining town. Co-written with Paul Schneider, who also stars, All the Real Girls is simultaneously achingly accurate and poetic in its portrait of first love.

Special Event Tickets $10
Sunday March 9 at 7pm

George Washington

Directed by David Gordon Green, Appearing in Person
With Donald Holden, Curtis Cotton III, Candace Evanofski
US 2000, 35mm, color, 89 min.

Green's acclaimed first feature focuses on a multi-racial group of preteens in the post-industrial wasteland of Winston-Salem in Green's native North Carolina. The film that established his now trademark poetic lyricism, George Washington artfully evokes both the lazy rhythms of summer in the South and the ever-shifting currents of emotion that propel the story. The cast of local non-actors captures the pitfalls and dangers of navigating the years between childhood innocence and adult responsibility with wisdom and grace.

Special Event Tickets $10
Monday March 10 at 7pm

Snow Angels

Directed by David Gordon Green, Appearing in Person
With Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano
US 2008, 35mm, color, 106 min.

Based on Stewart O'Nan's novel, Snow Angels chronicles three couples, their relationships in various stages of decline, as their lives overlap and intersect in a small town. A separated couple is torn further apart by tragedy, while a young man experiences first love as he navigates the fallout from his parents' divorce. Green sympathetically presents a group of often unsympathetic, flawed characters as they struggle toward emotional maturity, imbuing their actions with a touching humanity that counters the film's dark subject matter.