For the next four weekends, the Museum of the Moving Image will be screening vintage Warhol in what may be the largest such event since Warhol’s own Edie Sedgwick retrospective back in the day. Actually, the museum showcased Sedgwick last year; this time around, the redoubtable Mario Montez gets particular recognition with his banana-eating Jean Harlow impersonation Harlot, hilarious Screen Test 2 (for the role of Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and Hedy Lamarr biopic, Hedy. Hitherto unreleased is Ari and Mario, in which the ever-patient superstar is compelled to baby-sit Nico’s obstreperous child.
Opening programs include Warhol’s first feature, the silent Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of . . . (with Taylor Mead, Naomi Levine, and Dennis Hopper), three sex films of varying degrees of abstraction (Couch, Blow Job, and Harlot), an excerpt from the Pop Art epic Sleep, a selection of screen tests (Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Jack Smith), and a panel discussion with erstwhile screen-test subject Amy Taubin and Warhol-movie expert extraordinaire Callie Angell. In addition to classic talkies (Vinyl, Poor Little Rich Girl, Beauty 2), installations (Outer and Inner Space, The Chelsea Girls), deadpan performance films, the underground variety show Camp, and the self-explanatory Velvet Underground and Nico, this vast array of Factorybilia has some rare items. Since restages the Kennedy assassination with Ondine as LBJ, Ingrid Superstar as his wife, and Mary Woronov as the martyred president; Mrs. Warhol is a portrait of the artist’s mother as a 74-year-old screen star.
Footnotes include two related docs: Esther Robinson’s A Walk into the Sea: The Danny Williams Story, a portrait of Warhol’s erstwhile lover, and James Rasin’s work in progress Beautiful Darling, as in the late superstar Candy. “Warhol’s World,” October 20 through November 11, Museum of the Moving Image.
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For the past five Octobers, BAM has treated cinephiles to selections from that most cinephilic of events, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Everything old is new (at least to us). The focus of this year’s Pordenone Silent Film Weekend is prehistoric Danish cinema. Unknown master A.W. Sandberg is represented by The Hill Park Mystery (1923) and The Clown (1926). The latter, concerning an entertainer’s rise and fall, is touted as his masterpiece. There are also three engaging genre features by pioneer August Blom—The Last Victim of the White Slave Trade (1911), Atlantis (1913), and the anti-capitalist disaster flick The End of the World (1916)—and Holger-Madsen’s antiwar science-fiction extravaganza The Sky Ship (1918). Donald Sosin will be on hand to provide live piano accompaniment for most shows. October 18 through 21, BAM.
A highly influential member of the ’50s independent-film scene, Lionel Rogosin is celebrated with a weekend of restored prints, the premiere of a documentary portrait, and a panel discussion. Rogosin’s best-known documentary is On the Bowery (1956), but Come Back Africa (1959), filmed underground in South Africa, deserves as much recognition. It’s complemented here by the new video documentary An American in Sophiatown, as well as Rogosin’s last feature, the antiwar social satire Good Times, Wonderful Times (1965). October 19 and 20, Anthology Film Archives.