In 1970 Valerie Solanas was released from a mental institution, two years after shooting Andy Warhol. Still unstable, she moved into the Chelsea Hotel where she penned a death threat to Michel Auder and his wife Viva. Using a soundtrack by Wagner, Auder surveys the handwritten evidence...
The Chronicles capture the natural and cultural beauty of Morocco from its ancient walled villages to its nomadic caravans. Music comes from everywhere. Edited almost thirty years apart, the two Chronicles together are a study in Auder's approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same...
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...
The Course of Empire is inspired by the eponymous series of paintings created by Thomas Cole from 1833 to 1836. A 'text film,' constructed from iPhone images of writings by James Baldwin, Donna J. Haraway, and Arthur Rimbaud, it also features excerpts from Alexander von Humboldt’s slave-trade...
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that...
In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'....
A portrait of Rome that would have made Plutarch proud, Roman Variations was made during a residency at a studio provided by the gallerist Barbara Gladstone.
Video recorded in 1986, edited 1993. ”You know you're addicted to heroin when you begin proclaiming every bag to be your last.” Auder says this from experience. Throughout the early and mid 1980s he was an addict. In this candid piece of disclosure he demonstrates a method of smoking heroin...
Shot on his phone in 2016, Michel Auder’s latest work delves into stasis and acceleration at the same time: a compressed pack of digital memories indiscriminately flickering across the screen in rapid succession, separated by glimpses of nothingness.
Voyage's structure is simple. Coastal landscape footage and spectacular sunsets are combined with phone conversations recorded from a scanner that picks up cordless phone frequencies.
From its fiery outset, Brooding Angles is decidedly gothic and the mood anxious. It is a dark rumination on the specter of authority, resistance and paranoia marking the close of Reagan's second term in office. Born in 1945, Auder came of age during the 1960s, a decade as tumultuous in France as it...