Friday,
February 15 at 7pm + Saturday, February 16 at 5pm
A
Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory with
Danny Williams’ Factory
Films featuring live accompaniment by T. Griffin and Catherine
McRae
dir.
Esther Robinson, US, 2007, video, 78 mins, b/w and color
PLEASE
NOTE: Saturday’s
screening is A Walk Into the Sea only and does not include
Danny Williams’ Factory Films
 One
evening in 1966, while visiting family in New England, Danny
Williams got into his car and was never heard from again. A
year before, the promising young artist was living out his dreams.
Dropping out of Harvard to take up filmmaking, he found himself
in the middle of Andy Warhol’s close circle at the Factory.
Williams’ love affair with Warhol was brief and his mark on
the Factory scene was fleeting. Forty years after his disappearance,
Esther Robinson, Williams’ niece (whom he’d never even met)
uncovered a box of 16mm films he had made at the Factory. Featuring
interviews with his family as well as Factory members Brigid
Berlin, Paul Morrissey, Gerard Melanga and Billy Name, A
Walk Into the Sea is a demythologizing look behind the
scenes of one of the most important eras in contemporary art.
followed
by
Danny
Williams’ Factory Films
This
70 minute program includes Williams’ Factory Film
featuring amazingly intimate scenes of Andy Warhol along with
other Factory stars and the world premiere of The Velvet
Underground and The Velvet Underground Eat Lunch,
with the impossibly young-looking band rehearsing, clowning
around, and, yes, eating lunch at the Factory. These films are
screened silent.
 For
the luminous Harold Stevenson parts 1 and 2,
T.
Griffin and Catherine McRae created a score for guitar, violin,
samples and Walkman. Taking cues from modern ambient artists
like Tim Hecker and Belong, Griffin and McRae bury melodies
deep under shimmering drones that shift gradually over the film’s
40 minutes, evoking both the joyful optimism and the sense of
lost history and promise that were hidden in the films for almost
40 years. T. Griffin and Catherine McRae, also known as The
Quavers, collaborated on live soundtrack experiments with noted
filmmaker Jem Cohen, theater directors Anne Bogart and Richard
Maxwell and musicians including Vic Chesnutt, Tom Verlaine,
members of godspeed you! black emperor, The Ex, Fugazi and Patti
Smith. Their records have been praised in The New Yorker,
Uncut magazine (UK) and all over the US.
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