Film provides fuller picture of artist

Almost seven years ago, the audacious American portrait painter Alice Neel got a pop on the Boston radar when her raw, often sexually-open, candy-colored paintings were the subject of a major show at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover. That was just a few years after the publication of a 374-page biography, "Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery," by Brandeis University art historian Pamela Allara.

Now a documentary made by her grandson Andrew Neel simply called "Alice Neel," is bringing the artist back to Boston in a big way. Audiences will have 19 opportunities to see the movie at either of two venues: The Institute of Contemporary Art hosts its Boston premiere today at 3 p.m. and the Museum of Fine Arts has it in residency starting Thursday at 8:15 p.m. and running through Oct. 7. And there are two opportunities to talk with the director: after today's ICA show and after the Aug. 29 MFA show.

Neel was 84 when she died in 1984. Although she'd been painting since the 1920s, she gained recognition and stature only in the last 20 years of her life. That fame, wrote Christine Temin in her Oct. 13, 2000, Globe review of the Addison show, "coincided with the dawn of the women's movement and the reemergence of the figurative painting Neel stuck to during the reign of that most macho of styles, abstract expressionism." Neel was a political activist who had left a middle-class life in rural Pennsylvania to be an artist in Greenwich Village and East Harlem. Her middle years were punctuated by deep depressions and rocky relationships. She had famous subjects, including Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, and did covers for Time and Ms. magazines. In 1979, she was given an award for outstanding achievement by President Jimmy Carter. She painted her first self-portrait when she was 81, buck naked except for her glasses (that work is on the cover of Allara's book).

"My father does not discuss his childhood a great deal," writes Andrew Neel at the movie's website. Much of Alice Neel's life, the filmmaker continues, "exists only in mythological tidbits and anecdotes that surface year after year at family gatherings." This movie, he says, is "an investigation of the sacrifices she made in order to live and paint the way she wanted."

The score is by Jamaica Plain's Jonah Rapino, one of three members of the Devil Music Ensemble, which frequently performs original soundtracks at screenings of silent movies.

The film debuted at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Branka Bogdanov, director of film and video at the ICA, says that she and Bo Smith of the MFA coordinated on the timing of their programs. She's not concerned about competing with each other, she says, "because our audiences are so different and our locations are so different."

For information about today's ICA show, call 617-478-3103 or go to icaboston.org. For a full list of the MFA dates and times, call 617-267-9300 or visit mfa.org/film.

SCORING PRO TAKES BERKLEE CHAIR: Dan Carlin, who has been working on Hollywood films as a conductor, music supervisor, and consultant since the early 1980s, has been named chair of Berklee College of Music's film scoring department. Berklee says it's the only college in the world that offers an undergraduate degree in film scoring.

Carlin also is cofounder of Segue Music, a post-production company for soundtracks. He was chair of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which gives out the Grammy Awards, and for more than 20 years has been on the music executive committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the Oscars. He takes over from Eric Reasoner, who has been interim chair of the department since 2006.

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: "Casablanca" tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (617-734-2500 and coolidge.org) . . . Sophia Loren in "Two Women" on Thursday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 8 p.m. at the MFA . . . "Newsies" today at 6 p.m. and tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier" Tuesday at 7 p.m., and "Swiss Family Robinson" Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., all at the Regent Theatre in Arlington (781-646-4849 and regenttheatre.com).

And the Harvard Film Archive wraps up its summer series of double features with "sex, lies, and videotape" and "The Unbelievable Truth" on Friday at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., "After Hours" and "Something Wild" on Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., and "The Silent World" and a collection of films made on cheap color-film stock from the 1950s through the 1980s. As the Archive puts it, "While the pink film represents failings in the technology of cinema, there is something compelling in the unplanned and unnatural look of these prints: the look of loss" (617-495-4700 and hcl.harvard.edu/hfa).