Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum / The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975

Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum | A rich weekend of films inspired by the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: All Out / From the Marie and Jose Mugrabi Collection.
Artistic Director: Karin Rywkind Segal

The screenings will be accompanied by introductions from the Museum’s curators and guest lecturers.

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show

USA / UK, 1975 | Director: Jim Sharman | Cast: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien | 98 min., English with Hebrew subtitles

Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon), a young, conservative couple, find themselves stranded when their car breaks down on a stormy night and seek refuge in a remote castle. There they encounter Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), an eccentric scientist from another planet, who introduces them to his latest creation—Rocky, the perfect man, brought to life in his laboratory—and draws them into a delirious night of desire, music, science fiction, and gleeful transgression.

Jim Sharman’s film, adapted from Richard O’Brien’s stage musical, blends horror, science fiction, rock ‘n’ roll, camp, and popular culture. Fifty years after its release, The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains one of cinema’s most enduring cult phenomena: an exuberant celebration of sexuality, desire, and freedom that playfully subverts conventional ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as established notions of sex and gender.

The film’s iconic opening image of bright red lips seems to have stepped directly out of Tom Wesselmann’s visual universe. Indeed, both artists embrace the seductive excess of American popular culture, using the body, sexuality, and familiar cultural imagery as their raw material. Yet while Wesselmann explores representations of the body and femininity through the visual language of consumer culture, The Rocky Horror Picture Show expands that inquiry to encompass questions of gender and identity.

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The exhibition Tom Wesselmann: All Out, currently on view at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, provides the point of departure for a weekend film program devoted to America in the 1960s and 1970s. Wesselmann’s work emerged from a visual culture saturated with images of the body, advertising, and consumerism, at a moment when American society was undergoing profound social and cultural change. The program expands the exhibition’s perspective through a selection of films that capture the spirit of the era: the counterculture; growing skepticism toward institutions and authority; shifting ideas about sexuality, femininity, and gender; the struggle for civil rights; and the social and political critique that defined the years of the Vietnam War.

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Note: Film introductions will be in Hebrew.
The number of participants is limited | Advance reservations are required for all participants.
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For more information on “Americana: Cinema Weekend at the Museum” and the full screening program >

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Image: © 20th Century Fox