Viva

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.

A football player and his mates travel to the planet Mongo and find themselves fighting the tyranny of Ming the Merciless to save Earth.

Justin McLeod is a former teacher who lives as a recluse on the edge of town after his face is disfigured from an automobile accident ten years earlier, in which a boy was incinerated--and for which he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Also suspected of being a paedophile, he is befriended by Chuck, causing the town's suspicions and hostility to be ignited.

Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.

A neurotic film critic obsessed with the movie Casablanca attempts to get over his wife leaving him by dating again with the help of a married couple and his illusory idol, Humphrey Bogart.

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

Viva and Louis Waldon spend an idyllic afternoon together in an apartment in New York City.

"Tub Girls" features Warhol superstar Viva lying in a bathtub with different people of both sexes, including Brigid Berlin (as Brigid Polk), who appeared fully clothed in the tub.

A mysterious door in the basement of the Hercules house leads to the Sixth Dimension by way of a gigantic set of intestine. When lovely exchange student Frenchy slips through the door, the diminuitive King Fausto falls in love with her. The jealous Queen Doris takes Frenchy prisoner, and it is up to the Hercules family and friend Squeezit Henderson to rescue her.

"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

In 1969 Michel Auder began a series of video diaries that chronicled the art scene in downtown New York. In Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, Auder captures revealing moments in Warhol's public and private life: the opening of the 1970 Whitney Museum retrospective, a party held at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's home, a heated telephone conversation between Warhol, Viva and Brigid Berlin, and an illuminating interview conducted with Larry Rivers, the grandfather of Pop Art, following the publication of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975. The issue of money is a consistent topic of conversation with Viva, who after departing the Factory in 1969 sent Warhol a series of threatening letters demanding money.

A down on his luck former drug dealer is forced by a corrupt LAPD policeman to sell 100 kilos of confiscated marijuana in one weekend.

Three actors in Hollywood live and love together. A director comes from New York to make a movie about actors and Hollywood.

Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia. New Hollywood had arrived with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and already by 1968 it was changing how Hollywood thought and acted. The student film scene was getting ready to explode, and it knew it.

A political filmmaker finds himself in Long Island for a weekend where he finds himself entangled with a high-living, jet set crowd. At first it is exciting, but soon he finds himself disillusioned by their shallowness.

Iconic American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol is the subject of this documentary, which looks at both his life and his influence on pop culture. The film provides details about Warhol's upbringing in Pittsburgh and follows his move to New York City, where he found massive success turning pop imagery into art and eventually founded "The Factory," his famed studio and party venue. Among the many notables interviewed are Dennis Hopper, David Hockney, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Warhol Superstars Viva and Louis Waldon are the main subjects of Auder’s first film with synched sound, Keeping Busy (1969), which was billed as “a film novel about what they did to keep busy.”

Documentary portrait of Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

New York, June 3, 1968. Valerie Solanas enters the Factory, Andy Warhol's studio, and fires three shots at him, who miraculously survives, but is seriously wounded. What led this woman to try to kill the famous pop artist, as well as to write a manifesto calling for the eradication of men?

The film is a series of interviews with various well-known film actresses, including Jenny Agutter, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda. The title, which is borrowed from a 1958 film with the same name by Marc Allegret, refers to the sense the actresses have of what is expected of them by the film industry.

Vito gets out of jail after serving ten years and tries to find out who killed his younger brother.

Joe Spencer, a member of a motorcycle gang, is taking a shower. After his bout with personal hygiene, Joe encounters Andy Warhol's "superstars," who engage him in conversation. The superstars crack jokes he doesn't understand and continually correct his poor pronunciation in an attempt to deflate his machismo. In response to these provocations, Joe becomes more obscene and more boasting, but ultimately, he cannot compete with the put-downs that are part of the put-on performances of the Warhol superstars, who prevail over him in the end.

“The film flickers through a millennium of culture as it would appear to a tourist. It is an intense film, yet there is an incredible wealth of information surprisingly accessible. Aside from the exciting experience itself, the breakneck history lesson is a reminder that the mind can move in lightning steps: The plodding way information is typically presented is an insult to mental capability.” - Bartlett Naylor

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.

Frankenstein's monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa.

Viva and Taylor Mead are a married couple renting an extra beach-house to a group of surfers sent to them by a Mr. Morrissey of La Jolla Realty. Their daughter, Ingrid Superstar, is pregnant and on the hunt for a husband. Mr. Mead, who is gay, tries to pawn her off to one of the surfers. Meanwhile, Viva wants a divorce from her boy-crazy hubby, who wants a surfer of his own. Tom, a surfer, is inveigled by Mr. Mead to urinate on him. In a close-up, Mr. Mead receives Tom's offering ecstatically, after which he comments, "I'm a real surfer now."

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

Takes an in-depth look at the lives and times of the people who hung out with Andy Warhol and "worked" at the Silver Factory during the Sixties, making it all click as a new counter-culture arose and began to exert its influence throughout the arts.

On October 9, 1972, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse hosted an exhibition of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s work, designed by Fluxus artist George Maciunas. That same day, friends including Ringo Starr, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Krassner gathered to celebrate Lennon’s birthday. Jonas Mekas’s film records the event in both image and sound, capturing the spirit of the moment and the community around Lennon and Ono.

Reviewing home videos, filmmaker Paula Gaitán constructs a curious narrative about her youth while talking to her children. A filmic note in the form of an essay based on material made in Super 8. "Of which there are no limits, and full of affection and imagination", says the author.

Ondine is a gay man attempting to re-adjust his sexuality via various encounters with different women. After trying his luck with three women, Ondine becomes a background character in a sequence in which a group of Latin American men, calling themselves The Bananas, engage in a food fight. Ondine then engages in a wrestling match with Joe Dallesandro, who is married to Brigid Berlin.

Fiction and documentary mingle in a freewheeling portrait of Susan Superstar, a New York celebrity on a drug-fueled downward slide that mirrors Edie Sedgwick’s own self-destructive spiral.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

Michel Auder’s Jesus – in which underground NY artists and Warhol superstars openly discuss their beliefs. Jesus – which premiered as a screening at The Kitchen in 1980 – mixes documentary elements such as footage of evangelical TV programs, books, cartoons, paintings, and other Jesus related imagery – with performances including Taylor Mead as a priest in the West Village and Florence Lambert playing a crucified Jesus. Also, intercut throughout are surprisingly candid interviews with Auder’s friends, family, and people he approaches on New York City streets about their faith and relationship to the world’s most famous person. Among those interviewed are Diego Cortez, Jackie Curtis, Gerard Malanga, Alice Neel (Andrew Neel’s grandmother), Larry Rivers, and Viva.

Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph. Perched on the rocks of the island, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community. Pierre Clémenti stays there for a while and makes images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Pierre Clémenti's intimate love of these faces and bodies often naked in this Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the moving beauty of a utopia where living together could still be achieved in a territory of sharing and permanent creation. Flow of perceptions of consciousness, visual impressions, physical impregnations, the work of Pierre Clémenti is an ode to sensuality and "life-cinema".

Photographed entirely in color, Four Stars was projected in its complete length of nearly 25 hours (allowing for projection overlap of the 35-minute reels) only once, at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in New York City. The imagery in the film is dense, wearying and beautiful, but ultimately hard to decipher, for, in contrast to his earlier, and more famous film Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, Warhol insisted that two reels be screened simultaneously on top of each other on a single screen, rather than side-by-side. The film's title is a pun on the rating system used by critics to rank films, with "four stars" being the highest rating. From Wikipedia.

Trapianto heralds the end of utopia, the death of that underground, but is also the best prologue in Necropolis, which is not by chance found alive. It 's a film that establishes the passage of rolling between two friends, and Brocani Schifano, shared the same passions, and from living the cinema as a challenge urgent and vital, suspended between dream and action.

Documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field.

The first major profile of the American Pop Art cult leader after his death in 1987 covers the whole of his life and work through interviews, clips from his films, and conversations with his family and superstar friends. Andy Warhol, the son of poor Czech immigrants, grew up in the industrial slums of Pittsburgh while dreaming of Hollywood stars. He went on to become a star himself.

At a New York City restaurant, the patrons are men, nude but for a G-string, waited on by one woman, also clad in a G-string and a G-bestringed waiter.

A look into the many lives of Christa Päffgen, otherwise known as Nico; from cutie German mädchen to the first of the supermodels, to glamorous diva of the Velvet Underground, to cult item, junkie and hag. Many faces for the same woman, whom, you realize, just couldn't bring herself to care enough to live.

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.

1967 (made in 2015) presents newly found and digitized silent 16mm films from the 1960s in the form of a four-part composition portraying a cast of artists, writers, musicians and actors who made up the bohemian underground of that time. The film recasts the essence of a scene whose participants have since been idealized as celebrities or else forgotten.

The Feature does not reconcile fact and fiction; instead, it blurs the definitions seemingly represented by the film’s two clearly demarcated registers: that of the archival footage and that of the new, theatrical material. In his guise as “Michel Auder,” living a fulsome and extravagant life, replete with beautiful women and a rock-cut pool overlooking Los Angeles, the art world is revealed as a sham, and his character exhibits a repulsive narcissism. And yet, when caught in quiet moments, something poignant emerges—a glimmer of truth that rebels against the entire endeavour. Or maybe, that’s what makes The Feature.

With a rambling, unstructured style that echoes Andy Warhol’s own approach to filmmaking, this documentary profiles his career, showing him to be a brilliant manipulator, dedicated voyeur and person of astute commercial judgment.

Director Agnès Varda talks with LIONS LOVE (. . . AND LIES) star Viva about their work together, in this long-lost interview conducted for French television in 1970.

After Eduardo, an Argentine loner on the lam, arrives in the U.S. illegally, he forms a relationship with a woman and her teenage daughter.