Friday,
February 15 at 7pm
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
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 Lunc , 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.
