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Hallwalls & the UB Poetry Collection present
Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World
The Academy Award®-winning documentary film by Shirley Clarke (1963, 52 minutes)
"And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world" (Robert Frost).
In 1963, legendary underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke took on a (for her) unlikely subject, the far from underground poet Robert Frost. Even more unlikely, her film won that year's Academy Award® for Best Feature Documentary.
Long unavailable in its original 52-minute long version, Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World has now been jointly restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive and mastered to the best possible video standards by Milestone Film & Video.
One of the 20th century's finest poets, the 87-year-old Frost was nearing the end of his life when WGBH asked Shirley Clarke to film a documentary about him. The two rebels got along famously—both had grown up in the city, but had a love for nature. Frost's poems were direct and economic depictions of rural life cloaked in the colloquialisms of his beloved New England, but they were intricately woven poetic forms straddling the line between tradition and modernism. An iconic American poet, his work earned him international recognition and four Pulitzer Prizes.
This latest installment in Hallwalls' series of restored classics by Shirley Clarke (THE CONNECTION, ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, and PORTRAIT OF JASON) is being co-sponsored by the UB Poetry Collection, which two years ago acquired its Victor E. Reichert Robert Frost Collection, a "rare collection of letters, audio files, photographs, and other materials" chronicling the "24-year friendship between the beloved American poet and Victor Reichert, a Cincinnati rabbi who summered with Frost in Vermont…[and] was kept in the Buffalo home of the rabbi's son, Jonathan Reichert, UB professor emeritus of physics." The UB Poetry Collection is also the repository of the Hallwalls Collection, documenting 40 years of Hallwalls' history in slides, video- and audiotapes, printed ephemera, and other materials.
