The Secret Life of Plants. 1978. Directed by Walon Green

Film

No upcoming events

Held on Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 8:30 p.m.

MoMA, Floor 1, Sculpture Garden

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden

The Secret Life of Plants. 1978. USA. Directed by Walon Green. Courtesy Paramount Pictures

The Secret Life of Plants. 1978. USA. Directed by Walon Green. Screenplay by Christopher Bird, Peter Tompkins, based on their book. DCP. 97 min.

Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s popular 1973 book about plants’ lives and ability to communicate with other beings was dismissed by critics as pseudoscience. Walon Green’s underseen documentary shows what the book was perhaps always meant to be: an invitation to open our senses and, by considering the ability of plants to feel, communicate, and react to their environment, discover the mysterious, spiritual connections between all life on the planet. Featuring a phenomenal soundtrack by Stevie Wonder, The Secret Life of Plants is a visual and musical journey that changes—and amplifies—our perception of the human experience and its connection to the unknown. On August 28, a special screening will be presented in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden.

This film accompanies Paramount in the 1970s.
This film is part of Film in the Sculpture Garden.

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].