Film: Beautiful Darling

Andy Warhol Super Star

Candy Darling

Beautiful Darling, a documentary film, pays tribute to the short but influential life of an extraordinary person -- the actress Candy Darling, born James Slattery in a Long Island suburb in 1944. Drawn to the feminine from childhood, by the mid-Sixties James had become Candy, a gorgeous, blonde actress and well-known downtown New York figure. Candy's career took her through the raucous and revolutionary Off-off-Broadway theater scene and into Andy Warhol's legendary Factory. There she became close to Warhol and starred in two Factory movies that still shock and amuse today: Flesh and Women in Revolt. Candy used her Warhol fame to land further film roles, and her admirer Tennessee Williams cast her in his play Small Craft Warnings. She dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star, but tragically died of lymphoma in the early Seventies, at only twenty-nine.
Andy Warhol and Candy Darling
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Candy Darling on her deathbed

The film will be released this April. www.beautifuldarling.com

Italian Style on the Silver Screen

Italian Style on the Silver Screen

A major collection of rare images depicting the influence of Italian style in film will be unveiled at an exhibition at Proud Chelsea,  which launched last Tuesday with a private viewing. The exhibition has been curated by celebrated top photographer Rankin and Italian fashion writer, film expert and cultural commentator Anna Battista in conjunction with Peroni Nastro Azzurro. The exhibition officially opened yesterday at Proud Chelsea and from there will tour another four UK cities , until Saturday 2nd April where it finishes in Bristol. The Peroni Collection – Italian Style on the Silver Screen explores the relationship between Italian fashion design and its enduring influence on film making, image making and characterisation. The exhibition will feature rare and never seen before images and costumes from the cinematic world. The Peroni Collection references not only classic Italian films like Ladri di Biciclette and Bellissima, but also more contemporary titles (including American Psycho and Casino Royale). The images, taken from classic Italian film and fashion archives from around the world, showcase the beauty of Italian fashion on celluloid. www.proud.co.uk

Deneuve

BAMcinématek Deneuve

Stunningly beautiful, mysterious, ageless, and possessed by a peerless elegance, Catherine Deneuve is one of the most legendary actresses in all of cinema. Over the course of her 40 year career—from early work with film giants like Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Roman Polanski, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy to later films with celebrated contemporary cineastes like François Ozon, Arnaud Desplechin, Raoul Ruiz, and more—Deneuve has played muse for Europe’s greatest filmmakers, channeling her remarkable beauty and compelling eroticism to create some of cinema’s most iconic roles. Presented in collaboration with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Institut Francais, a 25-film tribute to the actress being held at the Brooklyn Academy represents only a sliver of the over 100 films she has appeared in during her career. Deneuve runs from March 4 to March 31.  www.bam.org

Openings: JAMES FRANCO / GUS VAN SANT "Unfinished"

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"Unfinished" features two films, Endless Idaho and My Own Private River, which are collaborations between Gus Van Sant and James Franco. After casting Franco in the award-winning film Milk (2008), Van Sant showed him the dailies and other footage that he had shot many years before for My Own Private Idaho (1991), which starred River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as street hustlers in Portland, Oregon. Much of this material did not make it into the final cut, and so Franco decided to fashion it into two new films, riffing off the original title. The opening is February 26th at the Gagosian in Beverly Hills and runs till April 9. www.gagosian.com

Goodbye Tura Satana! Into the Great Wild Beyond You Go....

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Tura Satana, who is best known for her roll as Varla in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult film Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!,has died. She lived fast, strange, and long; at one point even turning down a marriage proposal from Elvis Preseley. Bon voyage Tura Satana!

Stolen Youth: In Memory of Maria Shneider

Maria Shneider
Maria Shneider with Pistol
Maria Shneider

Maria Shneider, who was paid $4,000 dollars to star opposite Marlon Brandon in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, has died at the age of 58; she will be buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Cinema: Santa Sangre

Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal masterpiece is on DVD for the very first time. A young man is confined in a mental hospital. Through a flashback we see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers: he saw his father cut off the arms of his mother, a religious fanatic and leader of the heretical church of Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood"), and then commit suicide. Back in the present, he escapes and rejoins his surviving and armless mother. Against his will, he "becomes her arms" and the two undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.

Jacques Dutronc: Every Man For Himself

A friend and fellow Francophile recently sent me a link to the Jacques Dutronc music video for “Les gens sont fous, les temps sont flous” (which translates roughly as “The people are crazy, the times are vague”). Thus began an immediate obsession with the songwriter turned singer turned actor, who, in the 60s wrote hits for his then girlfriend, later wife, Françoise Hardy while at Vogue Records. He went on to become a star in his own right with his first chart-topper,“Et moi et moi et moi." Dressed to perfection in suit and tie at a time when most musicians were growing beards and donning bell-bottoms, Dutronc’s live performances were characterized by a wink and a nod to the audience, his sly, bemused expression transforming his particular brand of pop into a subtle parody of the genre itself.

It’s no surprise then, that Dutronc later went into acting, eventually starring in Jean-Luc Godard's 1980 meta-film Every Man For Himself, in which the pop star plays an filmmaker, also named Godard, who is grappling with the dissolution of his marriage. A brand new 35mm print of the film has recently been pressed and will be shown in Chicago later this week and in Vancouver at the beginning of next month. See links for dates and times: Chicago & Vancouver.

Text by Anna Wittel for Pas Un Autre

Noir City

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Poster for Among the Living (1941)

San Francisco's cinema gem, the Castro Theater, is currently in the middle of it's annual noir film festival: Noir City. I think I might just check out the last showing as it seems right up my alley. Showing tonight, Among The Living (1941): "Albert Dekker stars as identical twins, one a brain-damaged psychopath who stirs up a Gothic whirlwind of insanity, family skeletons, and murder in a small town paralyzed by fear. Stuart Heisler directs Lester Cole's baroque script with fabulously lurid intensity. Costarring a lushly nubile Susan Hayward, venerable Harry Carey, and pre-tragedy Frances Farmer. This rarely screened horror-noir hybrid is one of the most requested films in Noir City history, finally presented in a glorious 35mm print!" This film is not on DVD. Tonight Frances Farmer will have her revenge. Full program here.

Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures

"Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist's cinematic portraits and non-narrative, silent, and black-and-white films from the mid-1960s. Warhol's Screen Tests reveal his lifelong fascination with the cult of celebrity, comprising a visual almanac of the 1960s downtown avant-garde scene. Included in the exhibition are such Warhol "Superstars" as Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Baby Jane Holzer; poet Allen Ginsberg; musician Lou Reed; actor Dennis Hopper; author Susan Sontag; and collector Ethel Scull, among others. Other early films included in the exhibition are Eat (1963) and Kiss (1963–64). Twelve Screen Tests in this exhibition are projected on the gallery walls at large scale and within frames, some measuring seven feet high and nearly nine feet wide, while Kiss is shown at the rear of the gallery in a 50-seat movie theater created for the exhibition. Warhol's film Empire (1964) will be shown in this theater every other Friday starting January 7, for the duration of the exhibition. Sleep (1963), in its entirety, will be shown in this theater on Wednesday, February 2, and Wednesday, March 2." www.moma.org