PHILADELPHIA -- The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts will host a film screening of "The Cedar Bar" April 1 followed by a question-and-answer session with the filmmaker Alfred Leslie in Meyerson Hall B-1.

"The Cedar Bar" was originally created as a play based on the conversations that Leslie overheard at The Cedar Bar, a favorite haunt of abstract expressionists Barnett Newman, Willem De Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler and art critic Clement Greenberg. The film's tension is derived from the relationship between the people who create art and those who write about art.

"The Cedar Bar" was created using DIY desktop technologies spliced with dubs and edits of Hollywood films, television shows and newsreels that Leslie has collected. The film was stylistically influenced by the poetry of Ezra Pound.

"In Ezra Pound's cantos he would juxtapose his poems with unexpected events and fragments. This is something we do today when we are surfing channels on a television. There's a multitude of voices and characters," Leslie said.

Leslie's film adds to the growing cultural narrative of the abstract expressionist art movement that was taking place in New York during the 1950s.