Josef Albers

The genesis of To Open Eyes: A Film on Josef Albers developed from Arnold Bittleman's appreciation for Albers while Bittleman was a student at Yale University in the 1960s. Wanting to preserve Albers’s teaching method—learning by doing—Bittleman set out with filmmaker and editor Carl Howard to make a visual record of Albers teaching students how to see and use color as a visual grammar. The film includes archival footage of Josef Albers at home in conversation with Bittleman, as well as footage from Black Mountain College and Yale University.

Sedat Pakay's documentary film is the first and only time that the work and lives of Josef and Anni Albers have been viewed in tandem. Pakay worked closely with the staff of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and its Executive Director, Nicholas Fox Weber, who was a close friend of both the Alberses, and conducted a number of unprecedented interviews with people significant in both of the Alberses' lives. The film includes rare footage of the art of both Josef and Anni and insightful commentary from personal friends of the artists, including architect Philip Johnson, who arranged for them to come to the U.S. as refugees from Nazi Germany in 1933.

Before Brian De Palma became a narrative film maker he made documentaries. Among them is The Responsive Eye, which chronicles the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition of op-art. Curated by William Seitz, this was the first significant exhibit of optical art synchronous with and in some cases arising out of the early days of psychedelic culture. It’s amusing to watch the stuffed shirts within the art world attempt to describe what they are looking at in conventional terms or resorting to psychological mumbo jumbo without ever mentioning mescaline or LSD.