The film series, organised on the occasion of the late opening of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, will counterpoint the iconography of the show Coming of Age. American Art, 1850s to 1950s with four journeys into the world in which the average American lives and is (cinematically) immersed. More precisely, the films examina the environment of American cinema as a physical, topographical place and as a projection of desire, anxiety, nostalgia, hope and terror: four films representing the moral as well as physical models of the American soul.

2 July, 9 pm. The innocent gaze at the environment. The series begins with Edwin Porter’s classic silent film The Great Train Robbery (1903, 11 min), the first film in the history of cinema to utilize a rudimentary form of montage.

9 July, 9 pm. An impossible desire for idyllic nostalgia. Terrence Mallick’s Days of Heaven (1978, 94 min), a retrospective look at the young America of the 1910s, sees Hollywood cinema confronting the classic dichotomy of city life and country life.

16 July, 9 pm. (Rain) people on the move. With the film The Rain People (1969, 101 min), the young Francis Ford Coppola confronts the rapport between the individual and environment in flux, typical of many on the road genre films.

23 July, 9 pm. Terror on the post-atomic horizon. For this fourth “environment” an atypical film noir was chosen, one of the last of the genre of these American classics: Kiss Me Deadly (1955, 106 min) by Robert Aldrich.