About the Story

By Marsden Hartley

To access printable images, contact Tami Kennedy: tami@maine.rr.com

Cleophas and His Own, by Marsden Hartley

(Additional Points)

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was America’s foremost Expressionist painter. Many do not know that he was also a poet of major importance – and that he was Maine born and bred.
From October 2003 to February 2005, a cast and crew of talented Maine actors and technicians created a feature-length film in locations throughout Maine, celebrating the life and work of Marsden Hartley. It is called Cleophas and His Own.
Under the direction of first-time film director Michael Maglaras (who also plays Hartley in the film) a glorious story unfolded, frame by frame, in various locations throughout Maine, using a Maine cast and crew. Cleophas and His Own, a great story of love and loss, slowly and beautifully unfolded.
Cleophas and His Own is Marsden Hartley’s telling of the Nova Scotia fishing family of Francis and Martha Mason, with whom he lived in 1935 and 1936, who endured the terrible tragedy of losing two sons in a hurricane in 1936. Maglaras transformed this narrative into a kind of long, scenic ballet, using many of Hartley’s paintings, as well as flashbacks to important scenes told of in the narrative, and exterior scenes that provide the look and feel of the Nova Scotia landscape – all shot in Maine.
Hartley was close to all of the members of the Mason family, but he was particularly close to the two brothers, to whom he gave the pseudonyms “Adelard” and “Etienne,” both of whom drowned on the same night in 1936.
Hartley was clearly in love with the younger of the two brothers, Adelard, and was devastated by his death. In a sense, he never recovered from the loss, spending the last seven years of his life painting and repainting portraits of the brothers, of the family, and of the Nova Scotia he experienced while knowing them – as well as writing poetry celebrating the love and the great loss he experienced.
Using twenty-four of Hartley’s own paintings to enhance key points of the narrative, Maglaras portrays Hartley in the final days of his life, in 1943, as he spends one day recounting the story of Cleophas and His Own. Hartley faces the camera, quietly begins his story, and introduces us to the members of the Mason family, one by one. Through the use of flashbacks, photographs, and paintings, and with the deeply moving words of the narrative itself, Hartley’s story of his love for the Mason family takes the viewer inside the mind of this great American artist.