This past year, some of recent history’s more creative and flamboyant spirits have discovered and interacted with an eccentric and eclectic monument to the artistic pursuits of one of their own. That the artist was Barney Rosset, known primarily for his championing of literature and film, surprised most. But the artifact he created stunned all.

What they saw was a 12-by-22-foot wall-spanning mural, as ambitious as it is idiosyncratic, and a true emblem of the 20th century, even though it was conceived during the 21st.

Mr. Rosset, who died in 2012, worked on the mural in the last few years of his life. Astrid Myers-Rosset, his widow, said it was in 2008, after Rosset sold part of his archive to Columbia University, that he started the project. “With everything gone, the space opened up and he rediscovered the wall. He started the mural and it was three years going on.”

Those who came to see it were invited and filmed by a team that included Williams Cole, David Leitner, and Sandy Gotham Meehan. They aimed to capture both the viewers’ initial “pure response to it” and their reflections on it after they had a chance to observe all of the detail. “Barney’s Wall,” a documentary about the wall and its meaning to this group of people, will serve as a salute as well as a testament should something happen to it, a possibility that is becoming ever more likely unless someone steps in to preserve it.

Throughout his life, Rosset courted controversy through his love of literature and film and his struggles to ensure censorship did not silence creators of art. When he wasn’t fighting to import works like Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and Vilgot Sjoman’s “I Am Curious (Yellow)” to America, he nurtured an unconventional relationship with real estate, both in East Hampton and New York City.

Here, he bought Robert Motherwell’s Quonset hut in Georgica from the artist and had plans to move Grove Press to East Hampton in the 1950s. He developed Hampton Waters off Springy Banks Road for his staff. When Grove’s move didn’t happen, he sold the land to artists and creative types.

The loft the mural currently occupies was also the former offices Rosset used for his book imprints, Foxrock Books and Blue Moon Books, a space he took up after selling Grove Press in 1986. It is also the home of Ms. Myers-Rosset, but the building is up for sale and its future is uncertain.

A conservator has estimated the cost of moving the mural and setting it up somewhere else at about $100,000. The group has reached out to the Parrish Art Museum, hoping Rosset’s long association with the South Fork and its creative community will be an enticement to take and preserve it.

Mr. Cole said that Rosset made the loft his own by “filling it with books and painting. He painted everything, even the kitchen cabinets, the butcher block, and the fridge.” The carpet was a collage of rugs. Posters from films and photographs still fill the walls and bookcases. Columbia has accepted much of the remaining archive, and Ms. Myers-Rosset was in the process of packing it away while filming took place late this spring. Although much diminished, the space still reverberated with the creative spirit of its former inhabitant.

According to Ms. Meehan, “the original thought was to do a short, edgy film, a visual poem” to the mural. Then Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, came to the loft to see a letter Rosset had written to George Plimpton before Plimpton died, but never had a chance to send. “We caught his reaction to the wall and immediately knew we had a different film.”

“We’ve gotten friends, family, and even people who didn’t know him well,” Mr. Cole said. “We chose people whose reaction we wanted to see. There are so many references.” Without giving too much of the film away, one visitor sniffed the wall, another performed a ritual to summon Rosset’s spirit.

It was on a day in mid-May that they were setting up for David Amram, a composer and musician. Mr. Amram, who is a spry 83, started out in the 1950s with mentors like Charlie Parker and Aaron Copland and eventually worked with such diverse talents as Odetta and Johnny Depp, among many others. He wrote the scores for such films as “Splendor in the Grass,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” and “Pull My Daisy,” on which he worked with Jack Kerouac in 1959.

While he did speak about what the wall meant to him, his more immediate response was to play a hulusi, an ancient Chinese flute, for his friend and the mural — “part Lascaux, part Sistine Chapel” — he had created. He noticed the pool players with skulls as faces. It reminded him of celebrations of life in Mexico and remembering the dead. “I think that one is Barney,” he said, pointing to one of the players.

“He never said what he was doing or what things meant,” Ms. Myers-Rosset said. “He would stand for hours, so focused. He wouldn’t eat or drink, just paint, stand back and look at it, and paint some more. It was enviable to see him so absorbed.” She bought him a stepladder to reach the top of the wall, and he was up on it painting until the last six months of his life.

Ms. Meehan said that to her the mural was “a map of his life” that honored free expression, both his own and that of others. Unfinished at the time of his death, it may have been a project without end, as Rosset kept changing it as he went along.

It was the same here on the South Fork, Ms. Myers-Rosset said. “He planted a forest on a half acre of land. There were trees everywhere, and he kept moving them when he saw something that didn’t quite work. You could never say to him ‘that can’t be done.’ That spurred him on.”

Kabakovs on Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” Amei Wallach’s acclaimed documentary about the two celebrated Russian émigré artists who now live on the North Fork, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Ms. Wallach and Ms. Kabakov will answer questions after the screening.

The film was occasioned by the Kabakovs’ return to Moscow in 2008 to install a multi-venue retrospective of their work. The country to which they returned was very different from the one Mr. Kabakov left in 1987, and the film sheds light on what it was like to be an artist under Stalin and Brezhnev. Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times called it “a multifaceted, informative portrait conveying the emotional urgency of the Kabakovs’ work.”

The Kabakovs have exhibited at and been collected by major museums around the world. In 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale with their installation “The Red Pavilion,” and have completed important public commissions throughout Europe. In 2005, Mr. Kabakov became the first living Russian artist to exhibit at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Ms. Wallach is an art critic, journalist, and curator and the author of “Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.” She previously co-directed “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine.”

Ashawagh “Duo”

“Duo,” an exhibition of work by Kirsten Benfield and Jerry Schwabe, will be held at Ashawagh Hall in Springs tomorrow through Sunday. A reception will take place Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m.

Born in New Zealand, Ms. Benfield moved to New York at the age of 26 and now lives in Springs. She works in oil, watercolor, and various forms of printmaking. Much of her work depicts the landscapes and waterways of the East End.

Mr. Schwabe, who lives in East Hampton, is a man of many media — oil, acrylic, watercolor, sculpture, and photography. While human and equine figures are the subjects of his sculptures, his two-dimensional work deals primarily with landscapes, ranging from the serene to the dramatic.

Mixed Media

Dodds & Eder Home in Sag Harbor will launch “The Mixed Media Art Show,” an exhibition of work by 35 East End artists, with an opening reception tomorrow from 3 to 7 p.m.

The show, a fund-raiser for 88.3-FM WPPB, includes painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, stained glass, and collages. On view through Oct. 13, it has been organized by Bonnie Grice of WPPB and the Media Mavens — Annette Hinkle, Brendan O’Reilly, Michael White, Taylor K. Vescey, Michelle Trauring, and Kathryn Menu.

The reception will feature a live performance by Mick Hargreaves at 3 p.m., sponsored by the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, and, at 4, a live broadcast on WPPB. In addition, an “egg” swinging chair will be raffled. Proceeds from the raffle will support the radio station, as will a percentage of any art sales.

Selz to Speak

Gabrielle Selz, author of “Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction,” will be the guest speaker at next Thursday’s Molly Barnes Brown Bag Lunch at the Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan.

Ms. Selz, who lives in Southampton, will discuss her book, which deals with her complex relationship with her father, Peter Selz, an important curator and museum director, and growing up with an intimate view of the art world.

According to Susan Eley, writing in The Huffington Post, “Molly Barnes Brown Bag lunches are to New York today what [Gertrude] Stein’s formidable salons must have been like to Paris in the 1920s.”

Reservations for the free talks can be made by calling Ms. Barnes at (212) 888-3588 or (212) 755-1400. The talk will start promptly at noon. Guests have been invited to bring their own lunches, as the hotel kitchen will be closed.

Museum Day Live!

Saturday is Museum Day Live!, a program of Smithsonian magazine through which participating museums across the country offer free admission to anybody presenting a Museum Day Live! ticket. Guild Hall will take part in the event.

Tickets, which provide free admission for two people to all participating museums, are available at smithsonianmag. com/museumday/tickets. Visitors must present their printed tickets or have them accessible on their mobile devices.

It is difficult to believe that we observe the centennial of Saul Steinberg’s birth this year. Born at the very start of World War I, he is an artist who has transcended his era in quieter and yet more influential ways than many of his peers whose centenaries we have also recently marked.

Steinberg’s singular takes on the absurd and the surreal, his interplay between mediums, and his sharp wit and use of language all anticipate the work of generations to come, particularly in a well-edited celebratory exhibition of his works on view at the Pace Gallery on East 57th Street in Manhattan.

Like many creative types of his era, Steinberg emigrated to the United States in the 1940s, a refugee from the fascism gripping Italy, where at the time he was a student. Editors of American publications that had already begun including his drawings in their pages interceded to help him enter the country.

Although married to Hedda Sterne, one of the New York School artists captured in the famous photograph of “The Irascibles” in Life magazine in 1951, his playful art, with inflections of Surrealism, was not of that strictly formalist and nonobjective world. Still, it derived from the same influences, and he was friends with many of them.

His postwar work included renderings of fanciful documents and certificates with elaborate cursive signifying absolutely nothing, the curved lines just that. The fake certificates appear to mock the papers required by the totalitarian governments that artists were fleeing. As he was skewering the self-importance and ridiculousness inherent in those items, he was also tackling modern art in post-modern terms.

The Pace show is on two floors. Upstairs, photographs from 1949, of painted drawings of women on or in bathtubs, are both witty and intellectually engaging, a cracked mirror reflecting back half a century of Modernist art movements and tendencies. Steinberg used the camera to reproduce his art in a way that made it part of it. His embrace of the photograph to portray a doodle was anathema to the artists who rejected as art the images it recreated so faithfully. His implied irony and the classical figure it employed, the bather, came not from the sensibilities of the era, but from the Dadaists he cut his teeth on while growing up in Bucharest.

This kind of irreverence and blurring of lines between mediums correlated  more fully with the later neo-Dadaism of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the conceptual art of the decades to follow. It was not surprising to learn in the essay for the catalog that two of his favorite artists were Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Steinberg took his work with the photograph to further absurdist ends: drawing figures on stairs, walls, the floor, and on the street, using props like boxes, paper, brooms, and bathmats to stand in for themselves or other objects. When he transforms footstools by drawing cartoon cat heads and tails on the walls and floor beside them, it is both amusing and transgressive, but not in any way cute. The faces look more like the masks of businessmen than animals, even the one drawn on the floor with the feet of the stool in the air as if ready for a belly rub.

It was in these years that Steinberg started applying things to photographs, including his own drawings, whiteout, and rubber stamps. To an image of a crumpled paper mountain, he applied an increasing number of stamped figures of his own design, titling each work, such as “Three Figures in a Landscape,” for the number of stamped images. It was another way of subverting a classic academy genre.

These relatively simple works were very complicated in their rejection of formalism and the privileged sanctity of the art object’s uniqueness (or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, its “aura”), in their serial nature as well as their co-option of the readymade and a foreshadowing of later installation art. For someone who spent his life in the one-liner world of mass-market print and cartoons, this was denser stuff, even when it was delivered via the photographic image of a challah bread on wheels.

Downstairs, the gallery exhibits a wider range of the artist’s work, including a series of drawings and sculptures inspired by his drawing tables, urban streetscapes, original artwork for published cartoons, and a westward-facing view from his apartment, similar to the one that became the iconic New Yorker cover and poster from 1976, still popular today.

In the catalog essay, Joel Smith notes that “a stint with the United States intelligence service in World War II turned him (after his own fashion) American, and got him comfortable in the role of a cultural spy.” Steinberg revels in the modern American city, yet finds something amiss and alienating about it and its consumer culture. The surreal nature of some midcentury architecture was also a recurrent subject, whether a skyscraper envisioned as a chest of drawers or‚ closer to his East Hampton home‚ the much-photographed Big Duck, set by the highway near Riverhead to advertise a local farm.

His generic landscapes, pretty backgrounds of green and blue horizons in oil on paper, became a series of backdrops for nothing as well as the most fanciful of inhabitants and buildings. It is worth noting that he was both an early avid reader and a student of architecture in his college years in Milan.

Steinberg lived well into his 80s. Like Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Johns, who is, of course, still alive, his longevity surpassed many of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, who barely made it to their 60s. It is tempting to wonder if the quartet’s irreverence for the heroic art that most artists of their era held dear gave them longer and happier existences, particularly when the Steinberg show is such fun to behold.

The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 18.

Listen, you can sit in your dull Long Island home afraid of the next terrorist strike, or you can get out and engage the world. How about Florence?

Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature is back at it with another writers workshop in Italy, this one from Jan. 13 to 24. The focus in Florence will be on fiction with Susan Scarf Merrell. The author of a new novel, “Shirley,” about that master of the macabre Shirley Jackson, Ms. Merrell is also the fiction editor of The Southampton Review.

Beyond classes in contemporary Italian fiction, Michelangelo and the Medici family, and Italian style and design, the workshop involves outings to explore the city, the opera, the Bargello Museum, a winery, and the Italian countryside. To say nothing of the time you’ll have to play tourist on your own.

The deadline is Wednesday, and applications are free and open to all. The cost starts at $2,066.50 for the non-credit option, which does not include accommodations and airfare. The website to visit is stonybrook.edu/mfa/winter.

Every year there are at least one or two books that seek to capitalize on the “Hamptons style” whether it be food, art, architecture, environs, lifestyle, or decor. They can often be expensive and hollow affairs, produced chiefly for last-minute purchases at BookHampton for a host or hostess gift.

“Design in the Hamptons” by Anthony Iannacci, to be feted at an event at Mecox Gardens in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m., isn’t one of those books. It has all the bells and whistles of the genre, but takes up where “Designing the Hamptons: Portraits of Interiors,” from a few years back, left off, bringing readers into the residences of mostly the designers themselves, to show how they live.

Sumptuously captured by a team of photographers, the light portrayed in these waterfront houses can be somber, brilliant, dusky, or artificial depending on the mood. It is often the shadows cast by the architecture or the slant of the sun that gives a room its intimate feel. The imperfections take the rooms off of the pages of overly styled magazine layouts to favor the natural environment and ever-changing climates of the region.

As such, the fantasy that one could enter any one of these rooms is palpable and their minimal, primarily modernist feel is clean and unfussy, even in the more traditional structures. It is a casual style that is in no way unstylish, but not stuffy either. It is hard not to be inspired by them.

The introductions to each of the sections were written by Mr. Iannacci, who studied art and architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City and has been an art critic, journalist, and curator in New York, Milan, and Los Angeles. The essays are appreciations of the designers’ vision and lifestyle.

Some of the work or houses of designers include those of Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan, Philip Galanes and Michael Haverland, James Huniford, Todd Merrill, Suzanne Shaker, and James Topping.

The book was published by the Monacelli Press.   

If the precisely formed collage works of Glenn Fischer feel familiar, it is because they have visited the South Fork before, in group shows at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill and at the Kathryn Markel Gallery in Bridgehampton. The Bronx-based artist is now flying solo at Nightingale, captivating passers-by looking in from the street and viewers within the gallery.

Collage is a confounding description for these works, which seem too hard-edged, too precise, and too planned. There are many types of collage, but the rigid geometry here is contrary to the free-floating abstraction so often associated with the medium.

In this show, titled “Tales of a Librarian,” the paper comes from old textbooks, album covers, and magazines, with each making its own textural statements about color, form, depth, and breadth. They constantly seem to be something other than what they are, set on Masonite and mounted on raised board supports that make them more sculptural than a straightforward work on paper or canvas.

Mr. Fischer confines one source of paper to each work, so that one piece will be formed entirely from album covers, one from books, and one from magazines. In one of his album cover collages, he chose the shape of triangles, joined to form a design of larger triangles and diamonds. “Let It Be” tempts one with fleeting glimpses of 1950s and 1960s sleeves, at once familiar and alien. At times, it seems that multiple cuts from the same covers have populated the work, but the effort at matching them is perplexing as well.

Like most of the work on display, only a hint of the whole is detectable. There might be line drawings of bees’ wings or a tiny bird scattered here and there. Then there are the words and letters that appear in some of the triangles: an O‚ or an I, or words like “always,” ”soul,” or the words of the title. Look again and it all seems like a colorful geometric abstraction with nothing more to say apart from its complexly pleasing decorative qualities. The balance and movement of color in this particular work as well as the others add a depth and richness that belies the banal exercise that produces them.

But that is just one work, and an exception to most of the others, which are from books, organized into primarily circular compositions made from strips cut from pages and covers. The artist groups the deeper colors into coordinated sets that can look like clouds at sunset, thought bubbles, boccie balls, or a collection of Venn diagrams. The words can seem deep or ridiculous, and it is hard to walk away from individual works because the tonality, color, and text don’t let go easily.

The more colorful orbs evoke Japanese anime. Those with more neutral compositions look organic, perhaps like cross-sections from plants or wood or frogs’ eggs. There are strictly rectangular compositions as well, which tend to be vertically oriented and can look like the glimpse of something concealed behind bars or stalks of grass. The artist might use color here as well to unite certain groupings of the cut strips into blocks or brick shapes.

All of these collages have buried snippets of images or text, and the scattershot lines and words can form cohesive patterns in the work. Nothing too literal, but the eye does link certain passages to each other, intentional or not. A work taken from thinner magazine stock is multicolored and a bit translucent. Mr. Fischer has cut these pages into ovals and grouped them in color fields that have a certain Mark Rothko quality in their own striations.

What unites all these works is the precise application of the paper pieces. In the strip works, whether rectangular or circular in their orientation, the surface that forms the linear space between them looks carved rather than created by the knife-sharp cuts of the paper and its surgically exact application. Even in “Yesterday’s Son,” the Rothko-esque piece, the orbs of paper have a completely uniform pattern, as if it were a computer printout.

The artist said he sees his use of this material as rescue for abandoned modes of communication and entertainment in our increasingly digital culture. The inclusion of album covers, however, offers a glimmer of hope. For several years now, as vinyl returns to the mainstream as a preferred way of experiencing music, it has seemed as if some forms of media may never die after all. He recycles not only his materials but the thoughts and memories that he associates with the texts and forms of music he chooses. There’s something here that is meaningful and moving. He provides not necessarily a final coda, but a paean and prescription. Even if the patient has flat-lined, he offers rebirth into something as beautiful and full of meaning as possible.

The show will be on view through Sept. 22.

Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play, or it might be the sound of your hello, that music I hear, I get misty, the moment you’re near.

One can almost hear the deeply romantic lyrics as the musician Pat DeRosa plays “Misty,” on a Selmer Mark VI saxophone, in his house in Montauk. Airy, breathy like the human voice, the melody of Errol Garner’s standard is awash in vibrato as it races down the wire and into a telephone receiver, to be heard several miles to the west.

“I was born in Brooklyn,” Mr. DeRosa, who will turn 93 on Dec. 6, said. “When I was 12, my mother noticed I had an interest in music and decided to take me to the Bowery, where she bought me an alto saxophone.”

That saxophone, and a tenor sax acquired later, has taken Mr. DeRosa across the country and brought him face to face with many of the 20th century’s legends of entertainment, including Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, and Errol Flynn.

The musician, who has been sitting in with South Fork bands such as Mamalee Rose and Friends and the Nancy Atlas Project, played that alto saxophone through high school as war clouds gathered in Europe and Asia. Working for the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, where he built aircraft parts, he was granted a few deferments before being drafted into the Army Air Forces. He was sent to Greensboro, N.C., for basic training, “after which I joined the concert band as well as the 20-piece dance band,” he said.

As Mr. DeRosa neared a deployment to the Pacific theater in 1945, the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, ending the war. He concluded his service in San Antonio before returning to Long Island.

In the war’s aftermath, Mr. DeRosa was recommended for work at the Latin Quarter, the famed Times Square nightclub opened by Barbara Walters’s father, Lou Walters. While working there, he received a call from the bandleader Tommy Tucker’s manager. “They needed a sax player immediately,” Mr. DeRosa said. The musician set out for Chicago, and from there to gigs across the country as the band made its way to Hollywood, where it would appear in a film biography of the Tommy Tucker Orchestra.

In Hollywood, he met the stars of the era, also finding himself on the set with Abbott and Costello. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, he said, took him to lunch. He performed with the popular bandleaders Boyd Raeburn, Lionel Hampton, Tex Beneke, and Percy Faith. He has also played with the pianist Dick Hyman, and with another Montauk resident, the harmonica player Toots Thielemans. Mr. DeRosa, in fact, performed at Mr. Thielemans’s wedding reception at the Little Park restaurant in Montauk, where Zum Schneider now stands.

“The Big Band era was dying out,” Mr. DeRosa said, “so I went to Manhattan School of Music for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.” He began teaching in 1954, initially in the Huntington School District and then in South Huntington, while continuing a professional career that took him to Manhattan venues including the Plaza Hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Paramount Theater.

In Huntington in the 1960s, the owner of a local music store told him that the legendary jazz musician John Coltrane was looking for a duet partner. They played together for a year or two, Mr. DeRosa remembered, until Mr. Coltrane’s untimely death, at Huntington Hospital, at age 40 in 1967. He also performed at President Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball, and in the 1970s served as master of ceremonies for many memorable jazz concerts at Gosman’s Dock in Montauk.

Mr. DeRosa retired from teaching in 1978 but continued to play professionally. Thirty-six years later, he continues to blow that saxophone on stages across Long Island, sitting in with the aforementioned South Fork musicians — “They do a great job,” he said — as well as at the Montauk Yacht Club with his musical family: his daughter Patricia DeRosa Padden, a retired teacher who has been playing the piano since age 7; his son-in-law Michael Padden, a guitarist, and his granddaughter Nicole DeRosa Padden, a voice major and flutist.

“I look forward to my 93rd birthday,” he said. “I’ve had a wonderful life thus far and thank my daughter, her husband, and their daughter for their assistance in keeping me healthy. We are a family of musicians, three generations who continue to perform together.”

One item remains on Mr. DeRosa’s bucket list: “to perform with Long Island’s most popular piano player, Billy Joel. This would be the highlight of my career,” he said. “Are you listening, Billy?”

The East Hampton Library will present its 2015 tentative budget at a hearing tomorrow at 3 p.m. in the Baldwin Family Lecture Room. Registered voters in the East Hampton, Wainscott, and Springs School Districts can cast their ballots on the spending plan on Sept. 20 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Modest increases in the library budget necessitate the vote. East Hampton residents collectively would pay about $80,000 more in 2015, Wainscott would be responsible for roughly an additional $17,500, and Springs for about $6,250 more than last year. Copies of the proposed budget are available in the respective district offices and at the library. Absentee ballot applications are accepted at those locations through Saturday.

Since its founding 22 years ago, the Hamptons International Film Festival has featured one-on-one conversations conducted by film journalists and magazine editors with actors, directors, and other industry notables. Joel Schumacher and Hilary Swank will be among this year’s guests for the “A Conversation With . . .” programs.

Mr. Schumacher will speak at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m., when Jess Cagle, editorial director of People and Entertainment Weekly, will present him with the Golden Starfish Lifetime Achievement in Directing Award.

Ms. Swank, a two-time Oscar winner, stars in the festival’s 2014 centerpiece film, “The Homesman,” directed by and co-starring Tommy Lee Jones. She will be interviewed by Stephen Gaydos, executive director of Variety, on Oct. 12 at 3 p.m. at Bay Street, when she will receive Variety’s Creative Impact in Acting Award.

Mr. Schumacher is a versatile director whose film career began in 1981 with “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,” a comedy starring Lily Tomlin and Charles Grodin. Among his 30-odd credits are “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Client,” “Batman Forever,” “A Time to Kill,” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” He also directed two episodes of “House of Cards,” the Netflix series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.

Ms. Swank’s film career began in 1992 with a minor role in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” film. Seven years later she won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of Brandon Teena in “Boys Don’t Cry.” Her other films include “Insomnia,” “P.S. I Love You,” “Freedom Writers,” and “Million Dollar Baby,” for which she won her second best actress Oscar.

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will present a screening of “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” on Saturday at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor.

The subject of the 77-minute documentary, directed by Freida Lee Mock, is Anita Hill, an attorney and law professor who in 1991 was thrust onto the world stage when she testified before the Senate during its confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Ms. Hill, who had been an assistant and counsel to Mr. Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recounted, with graphic clarity, repeated acts of sexual harassment she claimed to have endured while working for him. Though she was vilified by many and Mr. Thomas was confirmed, her testimony opened a window on sexual misconduct in the workplace.

The film also offers a glimpse into her private life with friends and family. She speaks openly and intimately for the first time about the experiences that led her to testify before the Senate and the obstacles she faced in telling the truth. She also discusses her life and work in the 23 years since.

 The screening will be followed by a panel discussion including Betty Schlein, past president of Long Island NOW; Gini Booth, executive director of Literacy Suffolk; Wini Freund, former board president of Womens Fund of Long Island, and Deborah Kooperstein, an attorney and Southampton Town justice.

Tickets are $15 at the door.