Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd
323.857.6000
This event has passed.
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The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
- When
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Tuesday Jan 22, 2008 (1pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$2
- Links
The 1959 doomsday film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is an important time capsule with an uncomfortable premise; it posits a post-apocalyptic world where only a black man, a white woman, and a racist remain. As coal miner Harry Belafonte wanders vacant New York streets and imagines intimacies with mannequins (copied in current box-office bonanza I Am Legend), he unexpectedly discovers two other survivors. Each person struggles with how to salvage a human future in the face of society's now-obsolete racial divisions. Writer-director Ranald MacDougall's blend of mid-century American themes — Cold War concerns, sci-fi fantasies, and racial politics — still remains forceful almost a half-century later.
