On Tuesday, October 6 The Big Picture Theater and Cafe is having a special screening of THE STONE RIVER!

In an unsettling and poetic transposition, the residents of Barre (Vermont) give their voices to the testimonies of the European stone cutters who immigrated there in the 20th century.In the early 20th century, stone cutters from Italy and the rest of Europe crossed the Atlantic to work in the quarries of Barre, Vermont. But it is a later period that interests The Stone River, a film of words “displaced” in much the same way as whole corporations of pauperised Europeans. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration launched a vast project to collect oral and photographic testimonies, an irreplaceable documentation of America’s Great Depression, which Steinbeck used for The Grapes of Wrath. In front of Giovanni Donfrancesco’s camera, the residents of Barre speak the words of its former inhabitants. Filmed in their own environment with their own memories, today’s inhabitants of Barre are at the centre of an astonishing precipitate of History – a history to which they are linked through their ancestors or the profession they share with the strangers that lived and died by stone.Neither recitation nor simulation, this “reliving” of testimonies culminates in the song Brother Can You Spare a Dime, which sets the appropriate distance between incarnation and quotation. In the alleyways of Hope Cemetery, the warden suffering from silicosis, who “should have” died at the age of forty like the rest, is the ultimate embodiment of the past, clinching the dispositf that mixes here (America) and there (Italy), the living and the dead, stone and dust.

Oct 24, 2024, 5:15 to 6:15 PM

Oct 26, 2024, 10:30 AM to 12 PM

Oct 28, 2024, 1 to 3 PM