Ah, New York City in the 1970s......while the city was crumbling into a cesspool of urban decay, vigilante violence and moral morass (with the federal government looking away while the city declared bankruptcy), the art underground was, in fact, in full flower. This paradox (or not nearly one, if one contemplates other times and places where the social environment was in chaos and the artistic output was intense, say Berlin in the 1920s) is the focus of several films that are curre...

  In New York culture, all roads eventually lead to Andy Warhol. The pop prince, whose doodles now sell for millions at art auctions around the world, was prescient in so many ways about 21st century culture. He was a man of his times but also a prophet of sorts for the democratization and obsessive nature of celebrity (forget 15 minutes of fame......a spotlight can last a mere 15 seconds and still be a license to print money....paging Bristol Palin). The celebrity of those famous...

For the first time in memory (if my faulting memory serves me well and it increasingly does NOT), the New Directors New Films showcase opened last evening with a documenary feature. This annual rite of the Spring film season, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, was ushered in by BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK, a fascinating look at the New York Times photographer and his love/hate obsession with the city he calls both his mu...

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 a...

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival, January 25 – February 4, will open their 22nd edition with the highly-anticipated film “Factory Girl” starring Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Hayden Christensen and directed by George Hickenlooper, it was announced today by SBIFF director Roger Durling. Opening night will take place at the Arlington Theatre and is sponsored by CafeFx and Studio 7.“Factory Girl” imaginatively unfolds the comet-like rise and fall of 60s “It Girl” Edie Sedg...

WHY WARHOL MATTERS AT VIENNALEOctober 14 –26, 2005A series of events accompanying the Andy Warhol retrospective Working Class, a series of film lectures on the festival program, introduced at the VIENNALE 2004, will have a special follow-up this year. Following last year’s lectures by Jean-Pierre Gorin, this year’s Working Class is dedicated to Andy Warhol and his cinematic oeuvre, complementing the Warhol retrospective, realized in collaboration with the Österreichische Filmmuseum. Under...