Artists Space

Due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, Artists Space and Light Industry will be rescheduling all programs related to A Film Club for Adrienne Kennedy.

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942, 118 mins)

A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, "a play in which the movie fantasies of the heroine overshadow her life" and one of Kennedy's most celebrated works, opens on the set of Now, Voyager. The film and its protagonist, Bette Davis, had long held a special place in Kennedy's sensibility, providing a lodestar for her future ambitions; she remembers first seeing it at the Waldorf Theater on a Saturday afternoon. "The idea of going on an ocean journey and becoming transformed by it caught fire in my mind," she writes. "One day I’m going to take a trip on an ocean liner, I thought, and all my dark thoughts and feelings, all my feelings that I don't belong anywhere, will go away."

Years later, Davis's film returned to her consciousness at a decisive moment: "In the fall of 1960, my husband traveled to Africa to work. Our whole family went with him. As I stood on the deck of the Queen Mary a morning in September 1960 thoughts of Bette Davis and Now, Voyager flooded my mind. At twenty-nine I felt defeated because I had not achieved my goal to be a published writer. I vowed as I stood on the deck and tugboats took us out into the Atlantic that, like the character in Now, Voyager, when I returned from the journey I would be transformed...how or exactly in what way transformed I didn't know. Once into the voyage, while my husband and son roamed the ship I found some beautiful paper from the ship's writing room, paper with a marvelous drawing of the Queen Mary at the top of each page, and I started a new story."

Now, Voyager is screened at Artists Space as part of A Film Club for Adrienne Kennedy, presented in partnership with Light Industry.