You can see the new documentary “Enough to Live on: The Arts of the WPA” just once at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 4 at Norwalk Community College’s PepsiCo Theater, in Norwalk — a community where you can see one of the country’s biggest concentrations of surviving WPA art.
In Norwalk the WPA paid for more than 50 murals, with 31 in City Hall alone. The city “is considered as having one of the highest concentrations of restored Depression-era art in the country,” according to a Norwalk Hour article about the documentary.
The city’s WPA art wasn’t featured in the documentary, but the film does include a Norwalk man, Robert Reynolds, 91, whose father lost his job in the 1930s, according to the Hour. Reynolds talks about seeing artists as they worked on murals commissioned by the government at the post office.
Before the movie starts, a reception will be held starting at 5:30 p.m. The producer and director, Michael Maglaras, will be there with his co-producer and wife, Terri Templeton.
Here’s an excerpt from the film:
“Enough to Live On”: Film Clip Featuring the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance from 217 Films on Vimeo.
According to the website of 217 Productions, an Ashford-based film company which produced the documentary, it
celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project, and highlights artwork, music, writing, and acting, all created under the various New Deal initiatives that put creative Americans on the federal payroll and back to work as a part of our nation’s recovery from the effects of the great crash of October 1929.
Featuring more than 70 works of art from this period, as well as rare footage of WPA artists and others at work, this film tells the story of how Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal used the arts to bring a message of hope and recovery to the American people, as we dug our way out of the crisis that was the Great Depression. Written, narrated, and directed by Michael Maglaras. 2015.
Maglaras, in a short essay on the website, says:
“I realized, early on in the process of deciding what to use and what not to, that I had to choose my content wisely. Much of the art created under these projects was second-rate…some even third-rate. So much of the visual imagery was burdened with the obvious and easy: too many men with shovels in their hands; too much muck about the dignity of backbreaking labor.
“But as I worked through this content, I realized so much of what had been created was profoundly good; not only that, but that this film needed to be about much more than an elegantly created but isolated mural in a rural post office, or a puppet show performed in a public park giving kids a few moments of distraction from daily reminders of want, or a poster warning us (with graphic excellence and without a shred of embarrassment) about the disaster of contracting syphilis.
“It was about the recognition that when creative persons do what they do…they are working. They labor; they toil. They also create.”
This list of PDF copies of articles about the movie comes from the 217 Productions’ website:
Scrubbles – 3/11/16 (download PDF)
INK Magazine – 2/4/16 (download PDF)
Key West Blue Paper – 10/30/15 (download PDF)
The Forecaster – 10/7/15 (download PDF)
Artes Magazine – 8/19/15 (download PDF)
Hartford Courant – 5/12/15 (download PDF)
Connecticut Magazine – 5/09/15 (download PDF)
Associated Press Story – 2/15/15 (download PDF)
WXXI Public Radio – 2/6/15 (download PDF)
Film Announcement – 1/22/14 (download PDF)
The Forecaster – 06/10/14 (download PDF)