The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting...
In 1963 Boultenhouse wrote, produced, and directed Dionysius,which he described as a “free treatment of Euripides' The Bacchae.”It starred the dancers Louis Falco, Anna Duncan, and Nicolas Magallanes as Dionysius, Agave, and Pentheus respectively, and the experimental filmmakers Charles Levine,...
A fragment of an abandoned, long work concerning St. Teresa of Avila. A sexual orgy symbolizing the decadance of modern society. Maas, who acts in this film, plays the devil while a wild orgy goes on in his living-room. There is the fantastic drag queen doing her job in the bathroom while frenzied...
“Andy Warhol called Marie Menken and Willard Maas ‘the last of the great bohemians,’ and, in 1965, made Bitch, his real-life parody of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Willard and Marie sitting on the couch in their living room, drunk and arguing on a Sunday...
A film poem, a re-telling of the Greek myth in modern terms. In the traditional pool the water has become muddy and Narcissus finds that mirrors are more rewarding for the study of his changing reflections. There are three mirrors, each reflecting a dramatic study in self-love. The first, love that...
Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations is a portrait of Warhol's famous installation of floating silver helium-filled balloons at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. Willard Maas's lyrical "film poem" is the only visual document of this seminal exhibition.
This short begins with a couple about to make love, and then does a tour of innocuous objects in the room around them that invariably suggest sexual activity.
"A realism like that of GREED is lifted to a level where it becomes poetry. This is done by stylization and a few well-chosen details... a masterpiece." –Jonas Mekas, Village Voice "A black comedy which, in its cruel ending, has been compared to Harold Pinter. It is a hilarious satire on the...
A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a...
Photography: Willard Maas and John Hawkins. "Looking down instead of around, while walking, finding the magic patterns in the pavements of a city."--John Hawkins
Filmed at the Alhambra in Spain in just one day, according to Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger concentrates on visual details found in Moorish architecture and in ancient Spanish tile. The date 1961 refers to the addition of Teiji Ito's soundtrack and its subsequent completion, but the...
A young male protagonist dreams of a muscleman hero, a black dancer, and a princess who gives him a magic urn. When he wakes he rejects his mother (Menken) and wanders the cold streets, where he finds his dream characters corrupted or dying.
