A rare screening of Andy Warhol's film Chelsea Girls on 16mm.
Free and open to the public.
Andy Warhol's 3+ hour minimalist extravaganza, THE CHELSEA GIRLS brought the underground to the mainstream -- at least for a moment. Ostensibly taking place in different rooms of New York City's Chelsea Hotel (only part was shot there), the film is comprised of 12 unedited sequences of approximately 30 minutes each, projected side by side and showing many of Warhol's superstars at their performative zeniths. After premiering at the Film-Maker's Cinematheque in September 1966, it moved to midtown for a month-long run at the art-house Cinema Rendezvous -- unprecedented for an underground film. Featuring: Nico, Ondine, Mary Woronov, Brigid Polk, International Velvet, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Ingrid Superstar, Mario Montez, Angeline "Pepper" Davis, Eric Emerson.
The sequences, in order, are: right side: Nico in kitchen, Brigid holds court, Hanoi Hannah, Mario sings two songs, Eric says all (the trip), Pope Ondine; left side: Father Ondine and Ingrid, Boys in Bed, Hanoi Hannah and guests, Marie Menken, color lights on cast, Nico crying.
THE CHELSEA GIRLS has been called the "Illiad of the underground" by Newsweek and "a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl" by Rex Reed. You can't buy better press than that.