Warhol Shorts with Original Music by Indie Pop Duo

The San Francisco Film Society will present a screening of 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests, accompanied by beloved indie pop duo Dean & Britta performing an original score at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, February 3 at the Palace of Fine Arts (3301 Lyon Street).

Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol -- nurturing a career-long fascination with the transience of celebrity -- created revealing cinematic portraits of the actors, socialites, poets, drag queens and fresh-faced Gotham arrivals that visited the Factory, his New York City studio. These Warhol-appointed "superstars" were asked to pose, lit with a strong key light and filmed with a stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent 100-foot rolls of black-and-white film. The resulting 2-3/4-minute films -- known as Screen Tests -- were projected in slow motion so that each lasted four minutes. Many were included in shifting compilations and also were used, as were other Warhol films, as part of the light show for the 1966 multimedia happening, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. A selection of Warhol's Screen Tests, which for many years were rarely seen, will be screened during a unique evening of multimedia performance at the Palace of Fine Arts, with music composed and performed by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the legendary indie rock band Luna and currently making music as Dean & Britta. The duo will perform live onstage with a four-piece band in front of large-scale video projections of a selection of Warhol's silent "living portraits." This project is jointly commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

"Dean & Britta are well known for their love of film history -- their first album was named after Antonioni's L'Avventura," said Film Society Programmer Sean Uyehara. "The group's languid dream pop sensibilities and sly humor make the perfect complement to Warhol's vibrant superstars."


For more information, visit www.sffs.org.