Rene Ricard

A young musician takes a beautiful tattoo artist on a ride in a stolen classic car.

A thoughtful portrait of a renowned artist, this documentary shines the spotlight on New York City painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring extensive interviews conducted by Basquiat's friend, filmmaker Tamra Davis, the production reveals how he dealt with being a black artist in a predominantly white field. The film also explores Basquiat's rise in the art world, which led to a close relationship with Andy Warhol, and looks at how the young painter coped with acclaim, scrutiny and fame.

A kaleidoscopic film portrait of Shelly Brown, a twenty-three year-old alienated urban misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.

The Sunset Blvd. of underground cinema, and a suitably ambivalent retrospect on the star-game casualties of New York's upper depths, with Patti Astor statuesquely hysterical as a 20-year-old Norma Desmond, made up to recall Edie Sedgwick and surrounded by Warhol's lost children. We've been here before, but without the hindsight: a camera cruise along a hustler's meat-rack, kitchen-talk over cold canned spaghetti, Taylor Mead grimacing in a spastic dance, the silent stud a sullenly passive observer. Mitchell's ear for campy native wit and eye for figures in a loft-scape happily keep at bay the otherwise contagious NY ennui.

Second feature film by the French-born director is a Bertolucci-style story of a bored, rich woman looking for romance and adventure. She meets an American G.I., dumps him, then falls for a Communist worker.

New Cinema cofounder Becky Johnston recently described this little-seen feature as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie *Laura*” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.”

Photographed entirely in color, Four Stars was projected in its complete length of nearly 25 hours (allowing for projection overlap of the 35-minute reels) only once, at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in New York City. The imagery in the film is dense, wearying and beautiful, but ultimately hard to decipher, for, in contrast to his earlier, and more famous film Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, Warhol insisted that two reels be screened simultaneously on top of each other on a single screen, rather than side-by-side. The film's title is a pun on the rating system used by critics to rank films, with "four stars" being the highest rating. From Wikipedia.

The story of Joan of Arc as applied to the present revolution in arts and more. The Gothic is applied to the War in Vietnam. The film is experimental in the sense that in it the visual becomes tactile.

Instructed by Warhol to write a vehicle for Edie Sedgwick in a “completely white” setting, scenarist Ronald Tavel created one of Warhol’s most iconic films. Here a group of performers of all stripes – the sink and litter basket receive equal billing to the human actors – are forced into Warhol and Tavel’s cruelly comical theatre of the absurd. Inside this cramped domestic space, boredom, confusion and a sense of existential dread hang heavy in the air. Warhol and Tavel transform the modern 1960s kitchen – replete with the latest gadgets and conveniences – into a chaotic laboratory for self-creation and interpersonal conflict.

This film is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert's film classes at NYU, in which he was given outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence. Adding to this found footage, Sonbert filmed Warhol's superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga in more private and reflective moments. -- Jon Gartenberg. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Estate Project for Artists with AIDS in 1998.