Clark Art Screens 'Things to Come'

08:35AM / Friday, April 28, 2023Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Thursday, May 4 at 6 pm, the Clark Art Institute screens "Things to Come" in its auditorium, located in the Manton Research Center.

Presented in conjunction with the Clark's exhibition "Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch," this is the fourth event in the Clark's five-part series Visionary Architecture on Film. The film series explores themes related to Paul Goesch's life and work in early twentieth-century Germany.

According to a press release:

H.G. Wells wrote Things to Come (1936; 1 hour, 46 minutes) in response to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927). The film spans 1936–2036 as the citizens of Everytown, England envision the future of their city and debate the role technology should play. It is set in a subterranean cave, the antithesis to Metropolis's skyscrapers, and includes abstract sequences designed by Bauhaus artist Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. In one scene, a child of the future remembers a bygone city, saying, "What a strange place New York was, all sticking up."

Free and open to the public; no registration is required. The Clark's Visionary Architecture on Film series is organized by Ella Comberg, MA '24 in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Tags: Clark Art,

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9/11 Now Part of Broader Conversation in Classrooms

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:26AM / Thursday, September 10, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — When talking about teaching the greatest American tragedy of the 21st century in today's classrooms, teachers draw a parallel to how they were taught about one of the defining moments of the 21st century.

"Oddly now, it is kind of like when my World War II relatives and teachers talked about the Depression or Pearl Harbor," Mount Greylock Regional School history teacher Jeffrey Welch said recently. "The kids [today] are generally interested in personal and social history, and so, for that reason alone, they are curious.

"But 9/11 is also a 21st century icon. Local families lost loved ones, some of whom are still connected to the school community. Also, so many have connections to NYC and have been to Ground Zero and the museum. It is poignant, I think, but far less visceral for the students to study with the passage of time."

As the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on Friday, the nation's classrooms are the place where the events of 9/11 and its repercussions are being taught to a generation that lacks the emotional grounding in the events at Ground Zero that high school students may have had as recently as a dozen years ago.

At Wahconah Regional High School, Bryan Patton, who was reached separately for this story, made the same historical reference when asked about teaching 9/11 25 years after the fact.

"It's interesting because the way we have covered 9/11 has evolved over the years," Patton said. "It definitely used to get students' attention as a current or recent event years ago. For many students now, it's the way Pearl Harbor or Vietnam was when I was a student in the '90s.

"It was actually a difficult thing for my colleagues and I to grasp as they didn't live through it. It was before they were born so to them it's just an historical event. They ask questions. They care. But it's not the visceral response it used to be."

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