Yesterday was quite epic.
Jue, John, Kevin, a comper named Eva and I went to the ICA to see a screening of Under the Sea, a documentary by a woman named Esther Robinson attempting to uncover the story behind the death of her uncle, Danny Williams. He was a young Harvard dropout who wanted to make films, and so traveled to New York - where he lived in Andy Warhol’s house and became his lover.
Williams’s footage itself, spliced into the document, were incredibly compelling. He was a student of light, and combined dramatic, high-contrast shots with a soundtrack by (I believe) the Velvet Underground. From a technical standpoint he was a bit of a cute paradox and a boy wonder, a “Harvard electrician” who was one of the first to use strobe lights, and the mastermind behind Exploding Plastic Inevitable: the film&lights&music shows run by Warhol from ‘66-‘67.
It seems, however, that Warhol got most of the credit for everything - as was usual in the Factory scene - what a blow to your sense of self, always and forever! - as Esther Robinson pointed out. To be forever asked what Andy was like, what Andy wanted, what Andy had in his pockets when he died, instead of what you do and did, and out of what materials you made the stuff of your life with.
But as a student of the ’60s and of what Warhol represented and catalyzed, I have to say that I was so pumped to see interviews with Paul Morrissey, John Cale of The Velvet Underground, and Brigid Berlin, whom I have only read about before. That, plus the meditative strobing footage and the somewhat experimental soundtrack by T Griffin made the whole experience really sense-heightening. Even though the feature was probably was about a half hour too long for its raw material, it could have benefitted, I think, from another of Danny Williams’s films in its entirety (the only one shown in its totality was “Factory” - the others were fragmented and spliced in throughout).
When the film was over, the black box theatre we were sitting in revealed itself, as two of the black walls rose up to reveal a view of the ocean. On our walk back to South Station, we got this view of fog hanging heavy over buildings and buildings… I just couldn’t help myself from remarking on how beautiful everything was, and everything really was.
