THE LANGUAGE OF FILM: 
A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT HASS AND DAVID THOMSON

An Evening Of Wine and Hors D'oeuvres

Learn about our Silent Auction before the event.

Visit the MFA Raffle Page for information on winning a week stay at villa in Umbria, Italy.

All proceeds of this event benefit the MFA Scholarship Fund.

RSVP by February 24, 2012

“Girl Standing”

by Vanessa Marsh

Chromogenic print, variable sizes, 2008

Courtesy of the Artist and

Dolby Chadwick Gallery

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT HASS AND DAVID THOMSON:

Robert Hass

Robert Hass was born in 1941 in San Francisco, California.

He attended Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California and received both an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. 

Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Time and Materials. 

His other books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (2010); Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996); Human Wishes (1989); Praise (1979); and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

A book of prose, What Light Can Do:  Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World will be published in the fall by Ecco/HarperCollins.  He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

David Thomson

David Thomson, a film critic, was born in the United Kingdom and is an American now. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. He writes for The Guardian and The New Republic.  

He has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, and Salon. He has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and scripted an award-winning documentary, The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind.  

In a 2002 Sight & Sound magazine poll, Thomson named the following films as his ten favorites of all time:

• Blue Velvet (1986) 
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• The Conformist (1970)
• His Girl Friday (1940) 
• A Man Escaped or: The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth (1956) 
• Pierrot le fou (1965) 
• The Rules of the Game (1939)
• That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
• Ugetsu Monogatari(1953) 

He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two sons. 

Tickets

• $100 per person
• $50 for MFA alumni

RSVP Information

• RSVP by February 15
• RSVP and Purchase Tickets Online
• RSVP and Purchase Tickets at the Door
• RSVP by mail With Program Assistant Sara Mumolo 
• Purchase Raffle Tickets for a week stay at Villa San Martino

The event is underwritten by the generous support of Carol Sayers and John Briscoe.

 Proceeds of this event benefit the MFA Scholarship Fund.  The fair market value of this event is $50.  All contributions exceeding fair market value are tax-deductible to the extent that the law allows.