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Illustrations by Chantall Veerman.Every few years, a projection screen is installed in a clearing near the Greek village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia. Hundreds of red beanbags and pillows dot the field, with benches at the rear and a 16mm film projector atop its wooden stand. As the sun sets over the craggy Peloponnese, the projector whirs to life and spectators settle in for open-air cinema. Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. The temperature falls. Moths prepare for an epic frenzy.Without any opening credits, a flash of light floods the screen and then cuts to black. This is the Temenos. Long sections of black film leader advance and then strobe with clear leader, until sustained illumination bathes the audience. Dark again, the projection surface dissolves into the sky as our eyes readjust from the brightness. Finally, an image appears on the screen: the torqued body of a naked man glistening in warm light,...

By 1965, Andy Warhol had already revolutionized the art world with his depictions of soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Brillo boxes. His interests grew to include rock & roll — he started managing the Velvet Underground and eventually produced their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico — and he began making even more films, which starred members of his retinue including Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, and Mary Woronov, among others. Seeing how he fascinated the world, Life magazine hired photojournalist Steve Schapiro to document Warhol’s cultural ascension. Ultimately, the magazine never published the story.

“I was cured all right,” Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) asserts at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 cautionary science fiction classic, A Clockwork Orange, and audiences cheered. We left theaters relieved the teenaged thug who’d been beating and attacking his way through the future suburbs of London escaped government brainwashing, conformity, and supplication with his mind, and baser instincts, intact. Good for him. He is free to brutalize and pillage another day. This may be problematic as a working social application in real life, but it is the better cinematic choice.

The film ends on a classically framed shot of Alex (in his mind) happily performing the old in-out in-out with a pleased partner surrounded by an appreciative audience of privileged-class voyeurs. Literally looks like Heaven. It is one of the most memorable and powerful closing scenes in motion picture history. It seems a no-brainer whether it is the perfect conclusion.

Andy Warhol by Marie Menken. Competed 1965.

Marie Menken made several films inspired by and starring artists she knew, such as Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945) and Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961). According to Warhol’s memoir Popism: The Warhol Sixties (written with Pat Hackett), in 1963 Warhol was brought by his friend Charles Henri Ford to a party hosted by Menken and her husband Willard Maas at the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Warhol and Menken hit it off immediately and he would go on to cast her as an actress in his films, such as Chelsea Girls and The Life of Juanita Castro.

Close to the same time, Warhol was also introduced to Gerard Malanga, who would become Warhol’s main art assistant throughout the ’60s and who is featured prominently in this short film. In Popism, Warhol describes Menken and Maas as “sort of godparents” to Malanga.

Andy Warhol presents...

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol famously said, but the legendary artist probably didn’t expect that such a sentiment would apply to his own screen tests, which have endured over the decades as a curious, intimate look at the inner workings of his creative process.

Filmed during the ’60s-era heyday of his Warhol Factory, the black and white screen tests feature a slew of Warhol regulars — from Ondine to Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed to Bob Dylan — and other famous faces of the day, all lensed on Warhol’s own Bolex camera. Nearly 500 of the screen tests were filmed, though Warhol did not use or exhibit all of them. Favorites were arranged into various compilations that were then screened by Warhol for assorted audiences, though they’ve continued to inspire and delight fans for decades past their original filming.

Read More: Quad Cinema Reborn:...

Singer/songwriter Lou Reed.

I interviewed Lou Reed in spring of 2003 in conjunction with the release of his latest album, The Raven. A hero of mine since childhood, our chat did not start out well. As I entered his office in Soho, he greeted me with a look combining contempt and outright revulsion: "Oh you little yuppie punk, please say something stupid so I can throw your ass outta my office," it seemed to say. Happily, Reed warmed up over the next two hours and we had a terrific chat about many things, recorded below.

Several months later, I attended his sold-out concert at the Wiltern in L.A. Backstage, I shook his hand and told him how much I enjoyed the show.. He managed a smile, patted my shoulder, and said "Nice work."

Rip Lou, and thanks for it all.

Lou Reed Quothes The Raven

By

Alex Simon

Editor's...

Experimental filmmaker. Screenplay guru. Andy Warhol expert. Yes, Jj Murphy is all of these things — and he’s bringing his varied cinematic interests on a personal tour of the American Pacific Northwest this Oct. 6-9.

The fun begins at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington on Oct. 6 at 5:00 p.m. for an exciting screening of Murphy’s newly restored classic experimental film Print Generation. For this much acclaimed film, Murphy took one minute of the same film footage and re-printed it fifty times, over the course of which the image gradually — and radically — transforms into an abstraction of its original self.

This new print of Print Generation comes courtesy of Mark Toscano and the Academy Film Archive. The film will screen at this event along with two other short works by Murphy. Click here for more information.

Murphy and Print Generation will then move to Portland, Oregon for...

The following is an introduction to a new edition of Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" [W.W. Norton, $24.95] written by Andrew Biswell. The piece sheds light on the enduring legacy of the novel, and the various dystopian works that influenced Burgess's writing. Biswell also discusses Burgess's (often clever) responses to the novel's adaptation, and ideas for adaptations that never came to fruition:

In 1994, less than a year after Anthony Burgess had died at the age of seventy-six, BBC Scotland commissioned the novelist William Boyd to write a radio play in celebration of his life and work. This was broadcast during the Edinburgh Festival on 21 August 1994, along with a concert performance of Burgess’s music and a recording of his Glasgow Overture. The programme was called "An Airful of Burgess," with the actor John Sessions playing the parts of both Burgess and his fictional alter ego, the poet F. X. Enderby. On the same day,...

Filmmaker Bob Moricz has reported that legendary underground film actor Bob Cowan has passed away. While Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film hasn’t completely confirmed the report, it appears that Cowan died on Tuesday, June 23, in his home in Toronto, Canada. He is survived by his wife Jane.

Cowan was a regular performer and collaborator with the filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar, and is most well-known as starring as the robot Xar in the classic film Sins of the Fleshapoids. (Pictured) But, more than just acting in the movie, Cowan also served as the film’s narrator and assembled its memorable music score.

In the ’60s and ’70s, Cowan was one of a few underground film acting “superstars,” along with performers such as Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez and Donna Kerness.

Other Kuchar films Cowan appeared in were George’s Lust for Ecstasy and The...

MoMA’s film exhibitions for June include a look at the influence of melodrama and soap opera on cinema, as well as some of Finland’s best documentaries.

Good to note is that the price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket with the presentation of the film ticket stub within 30 days of the date on the stub!

June 4-19, 2011: Drama Queen: The Soap Opera in Experimental Cinema

Through filmmakers such as Eija- Liisa Ahtila, Dara Birnbaum, Stan Brakhage, Ximena Cuevas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hollis Frampton, George Kuchar, Kalup Linzy, Tony Oursler, Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Sirk, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, “Drama Queen” tackles the cinematic reinvention, deconstruction and parodying of melodrama within experimental filmmaking.

The series’ titles include:

Far from Heaven. 2002. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson. 107 min.

Coming Apart.

MoMA’s film exhibitions for June include a look at the influence of melodrama and soap opera on cinema, as well as some of Finland’s best documentaries.

Good to note is that the price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket with the presentation of the film ticket stub within 30 days of the date on the stub!

June 4-19, 2011: Drama Queen: The Soap Opera in Experimental Cinema

Through filmmakers such as Eija- Liisa Ahtila, Dara Birnbaum, Stan Brakhage, Ximena Cuevas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hollis Frampton, George Kuchar, Kalup Linzy, Tony Oursler, Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Sirk, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, “Drama Queen” tackles the cinematic reinvention, deconstruction and parodying of melodrama within experimental filmmaking.

The series’ titles include:

Far from Heaven. 2002. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson. 107 min.

Coming Apart.

Beautiful Darling, the haunting new documentary about the Andy Warhol superstar and pioneering drag-queen transsexual Candy Darling, includes a detail that may not seem to be that big a deal, but that began to astonish me the more I thought about it. It’s that Candy, by the early 1970s, after she’d already become a famous fixture on the downtown scene, was still impoverished, crashing on people’s couches, eating a can of beans for dinner, and — the movie strongly suggests — turning tricks to survive. Basically, she was living the desperate, scraping-through-each-day existence of just about any anonymous New York drag queen.

By Christopher Stipp

The Archives, Right Here

Check out my other column, This Week In Trailers, at SlashFilm.com and follow me on Twitter under the name: Stipp

Ice Road Truckers - DVD Review

I once had a job where it was my job to obtain truck freight.

As I made my way all across the Us I realized that everything that we get in this country is obtained by the trucking industry. Bottom line. From the keyboards that you and I write on, the chairs we sit in, the produce and food we eat, the clothes we wear, everything gets here by truck.

That’s why knowing this information makes for a good primer in understanding why Season Three of Ice Road Truckers is such a thrill to watch. While not necessarily family entertainment, some of these road dogs are a bit salty, the program continues to feed my...

This is the 6th post in a series covering the most outrageous moments in underground film history. You can follow the entire series here.

Film: Empire

Director: Andy Warhol

Year: 1964

During his entire filmmaking career, artist Andy Warhol filmed lots of outrageous stuff. With films with titles like Lonesome Cowboys, Nude Restaurant, Mario Banana, Suicide, Bitch — and worse! — it was clear Warhol liked to shock, enrage and embarrass his audiences.

However, the most outrageous thing Warhol ever filmed? The Empire State Building. One shot. For six hours straight. Well, Warhol filmed the topmost portion of the then world’s tallest building for six hours, but when projected he slowed the film down so that he expected audiences to watch a single, static shot for over eight hours.

According to Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga in the Victor Bockris biography The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, filmmaker John Palmer came up with the concept for Empire.

Arthouse Films/Red Envelope Entertainment

NEW YORK -- Two spectral presences haunt A Walk Into the Sea, filmmaker Esther Robinson's portrait of her uncle Danny Williams. One is the subject himself, who apparently committed suicide at age 27 by carrying out the titular act late one night in 1966; the other is Andy Warhol, in whose Factory Williams toiled as a filmmaker and lighting designer, and who was also -- if only briefly -- the young man's lover.

A veritable cottage industry of Warhol-themed documentaries has sprung up in recent years, and it's easy to see why. This endlessly colorful figure serves as both a fascinatingly enigmatic character and an emblematic icon of his times.

He's a far more vivid presence in this film than Williams, who, as the many interviews included here demonstrate, is barely remembered by his cohorts in Warhol's group and is only briefly referred to in the artist's diaries. But the snippets of 16mm films he shot, featuring Warhol and such characters as Bridget Polk, Gerard Malanga and many others, vividly attest to his presence on the scene.

Williams, a Harvard dropout who briefly apprenticed with the Maysles brothers (Albert is interviewed here), designed and operated the light show for the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows that featured the Velvet Underground.

He later became estranged from the Factory because of the jealousy of several of its other members and Warhol's eventual disinterest. Addicted to amphetamines, he moved back to his family home in Massachusetts. One night, he excused himself after dinner and was never seen again. His car was found near a cliff overlooking the sea, and his body was never found.

The ambiguity of his disappearance adds even more resonance to a story filled with vague recollections by the aged members of Warhol's coterie, whose lined faces contrast dramatically with the gorgeously youthful portraits captured in Williams' films.