White Light Cinema Presents

Andy Warhol’s Face & The Velvet Underground in Boston
Two New Preservations!

Presented in Memory of Callie Angell

Saturday, December 18 – 8:00pm
At The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)

Andy Warhol’s filmography continues to produce unknown and barely-known films as films are slowly preserved and released. FACE is one of those barely-known titles – it was publicly shown but little seen before Warhol withdrew all of his films from distribution. Starring the magnetic Edie Sedgwick, who comes closest to being a muse for Warhol of all the Factory regulars, FACE is an extreme example of Warhol’s interest in portraiture: the film is a nearly 70 minute extended “close-up” of Sedgwick as she performs a variety of mundane tasks, converses with an off-screen Chuck Wein, and just is herself.

Also showing is another newly preserved film, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND IN BOSTON, featuring the band in concert.
This program is presented in memory of Callie Angell (1948-2010). Angell was a film curator, writer, researcher, and project director. She worked at Anthology Film Archives and the Whitney Museum in New York City and for the past ten years was the director of the Andy Warhol Film Project, where she was preparing a two-volume catalog raisonée on Warhol’s films (volume one, on the Screen Tests, was published in 2008; volume two was nearing completion). Angell has become the foremost expert on Warhol’s films and was a tireless champion of his work.

FACE (1965, 66 mins., 16mm, new preservation print)
“Featuring two fixed-frame shots of Warhol’s socialite superstar Edie Sedgwick, FACE (1965, USA, 66 min.) captures what the singer and poet Patti Smith described as Sedgwick’s ability to radiate ‘intelligence, speed, and being connected with the moment.’” (MoMA)

“In FACE, Warhol focuses exclusively on a closeup of Edie’s face for the entire 66-minute film, thereby demonstrating that his most famous superstar had the ability to command an audience’s attention while merely playing music, applying makeup and accessories, smoking marijuana, talking on the phone with a friend, and conversing with Chuck Wein, who, as usual, remains an elusive figure offscreen.” (J.J. Murphy)

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND IN BOSTON (1967, 33 mins., 16mm, new preservation print)
“THE VELVET UNDERGROUND IN BOSTON (1967, USA, 33 min.), which Warhol shot during a concert at the Boston Tea Party, features a variety of filmmaking techniques—sudden in-and-out zooms, sweeping panning shots, in-camera edits that create single frame images and bursts of light like paparazzi flash bulbs going off—that mirror the kinesthetic experience of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with its strobe lights, whip dancers, colorful slide shows, multi-screen projections, liberal use of amphetamines, and overpowering sound of The Velvet Underground.” (MoMA)

Admission: $7.00-10.00 sliding scale