Mary Lea Bandy

Prolific, mercurial, thought-provoking, charming, engaging, dynamic, confusing--just like the artist himself, Andy Warhol's films explore the gamut of human emotion. From the time he obtained his first film camera in 1963, up until his death in 1987, Warhol explored and created moving images ranging from epic films, to personal portraits, to programs for cable television, to music videos. In fact, in a mere five years (1963-1968) he produced nearly 650 films including hundreds of silent screen tests--portrait films--and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.” His films and videos capture the rich and raw texture of the fertile cultural milieu in which he lived and worked, and are crucial to the understanding of Warhol's work in other media. Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist's screen tests and non-narrative films from 1963-73. Within it we see sequences of his “most beautiful women”--screen tests featuring “Baby” Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Edie Sedgwick--and other works that showcase a parade of friends, actors, and models--Dennis Hopper, Gerard Malanga and Walter Burn to name just a few. This collection of tests is followed by the artist's non-narrative films including Eat, Sleep, Kiss and Blow Job. All of the artist's film works are enhanced by texts from Mary Lea Bandy, Klaus Biesenbach and others. The worlds of art, photography, film, criticism, lifestyle and fashion unite in Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, as 200 fascinating, full-bleed, remarkably clear, black and white stills provide access into territories both familiar and unexplored.

The subject of God has often been touched on in the movies. European directors like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini and many others have dealt directly with the theme throughout their careers, and Hollywood too has told stories based on the Bible, the lives of the saints and the martyrdoms of ordinary people. The Hidden God, which accompanies a film series of the same name organized by The Museum of Modern Art and screening in October and November of 2003, explores the ways in which a sense of God may appear in films, whether or not it is understood as such or is visible to the eye. This book contains over 50 essays by a wide range of writers, who find God encoded not only in explicitly religious subjects but in westerns, horror movies, comedies and many other genres, and in films from all over the world. In the times, places and societies these filmmakers explore, God may be lost, found, absent entirely or seen by only a few, whether saint or sinner.