Art Law Films

Welcome to the Center for Art Law Film Archive! Looking for a good Saturday night movie? From documentaries to historical drama and fiction, we've got you covered. Here is our selection of art law films from the early 1960's onwards, organized by release date. We also have an extensive film list on our Letterboxd shelf: https://letterboxd.com/artlawfilms/list/art-law-films/. Bookmark the list, share with friends and tell us your thoughts in the reviews! Happy watching. - Center for Art Law

The Center for Art Law is a nonprofit organization that conducts research and offers resources and programming for the advancement of a vibrant arts and law community.;xNLx;;xNLx;;xNLx;

1966-07-13 13:42:42

How to Steal a Million

Enter Charles Bonnet (Hugh Griffith) expresses his passion for art by forging masterpieces -- and selling them at a hefty profit. The trouble starts when his reproduction of a prized sculpture winds up in a famous Paris museum. If experts determine that it is inauthentic, Bonnet's reputation will be tarnished. That's why his fetching daughter, Nicole (Audrey Hepburn), hires cat burglar Simon Dermott (Peter O'Toole) to steal the sculpture back before it's too late.info here

1973-07-13 13:42:42

F for Fake

Orson Welles' final film documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.

1989-02-19 17:08:58

Trial of Tilted Arc

A thought-provoking documentary chronicling the climactic General Services Administration hearing that decided the fate of Richard Serra's public sculpture, Tilted Arc. Commissioned and installed by the U.S. government in 1981, the sculpture became the center of controversy four years later when a public hearing was held to consider its removal from Federal Plaza in New York City. The trial raised several issues, including the validity of a contract between an artist and the government, the freedom of artistic expression, and the role of the public in designing the visual environment. During the course of the hearing, Serra's site-specific work is described in terms ranging from "masterpiece" to "mouse trap."

1989-10-13 00:11:17

Architecture of Doom

Peter Cohen's film is a brilliant two-hour documentation of the direct if paradoxical connection between beauty and evil in Hitler's Third Reich. The evil, of course, far surpassed mere damage. Cohen, an award-winning filmmaker born in Sweden to parents who fled from Nazi Germany and Austria, believes that the Nazi horror can be comprehended as a pervasive manifestation of a perverse aesthetic doctrine: to make the world beautiful by doing violence to it. This provocative thesis, systematically explored, gives a compelling pace to the film.

1990-05-08 00:43:58

Plunder!

Frontline correspondent Carl Nagin investigates the looting of pre-Columbian tombs in Latin America and the trafficking of stolen artifacts, exposing a trail that leads to auction houses, galleries, museums, and private collections in the United States.

1991-11-08 00:11:17

Portrait of a Master Forger

"A documentary featuring an interview with Eric Hebborn at his home in Italy. Eric Hebborn (1934-1996) was a British painter and art forger and later an author. On January 8, 1996, Eric Hebborn was found lying in a street in Rome, his skull crushed with a blunt instrument. He died three days later in the hospital on January 11, 1996." In this documentary, Hebborn speaks about his life and his personal opinions about forgery. Eric Hebborn wrote multiple books in his life, one of which is called The Art Forger's Handbook.

1997-01-06 04:30:59

Stolen Treasures

New York Times investigation of Jonathan Tokley-Perry and Frederick Schultz smuggling of Egyptian antiquities, with some attention to looting of Iraq Museum.

1999-06-17 09:51:29

The Thomas Crown Affair

Bored billionaire Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) decides to entertain himself by stealing a Monet from a reputed museum. When Catherine Banning (Rene Russo), an investigator for the museum's insurance company, takes an interest in Crown, a complicated back-and-forth game with romantic undertones begins between them. In an attempt to find out where Banning's loyalties lie, Crown returns the painting and essentially turns himself in, hoping that Banning's feelings for him will lead to an escape.

1999-08-20 00:43:58

Mickey Blue Eyes

A hilarious comedy crime film featuring Hugh Grant as an English auctioneer who is reluctantly involved in the mafia business of his future father in law. Featuring money laundering scams in auction houses and love, this movie is a classic romcom with a dash of art fraud.

2000-01-07 13:13:01

Who Owns the Past?

"The final decades of the twentieth century brought unprecedented changes for American Indians, especially in the areas of human rights and tribal sovereignty. In 1990, after a long struggle between Indian rights groups and the scientific establishment, the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act was passed. For American Indians, this was perhaps the most important piece of civil and human rights legislation of this century. Skeletons and grave goods that had been gathering dust in museums around the country could come home again, and Indian graves would be protected from further desecration. But a case tested these claims, and Who Owns the Past? focuses on the controversy that emerged. The discovery of a 9,000-year-old skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, reignited the conflict between anthropologists and Indian people over the control of human remains found on ancestral Indian lands. Anthropologists insist that these remains hold the key to America's past and must be studied for the benefit of mankind, while many Indian people believe that exhuming and studying them is a desecration of their ancestors. Kennewick Man became a test case for NAGPRA and all that it symbolizes for American Indians. Who Owns the Past? examines how two ways of seeing the world - scientific versus traditional - are clashing in the case of Kennewick Man."

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