Beverly Grant

Movies12

• Movie7.3

  Documentary

  Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

  Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

  1968 · 32 votes

• Movie6.1

  Documentary

  Ron Rice's Chumlum is one of those films in which the conditions of its construction are integral to the experience of watching it. It is a record of a cadre of creative people having fun on camera, playing dress-up, dancing, flirting, lazing around.

  Chumlum

  1963 · 13 votes

• Movie4.6

  ThrillerDrama

  Batman Dracula is a 1964 black and white American film produced and directed by Andy Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. The film was screened only at Warhol's art exhibits. A fan of the Batman series, Warhol made the movie as a homage. Batman Dracula is considered to be the first film featuring a blatantly campy Batman. The film was thought to have been lost until scenes from it were shown at some length in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.

  Batman Dracula

  1964 · 9 votes

• Movie6.0

  Fantasy

  At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.

  The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

  1968 · 13 votes

• Movie7.2

  Thriller

  A follow-up to now legendary film Flaming Creatures. This vivid, full-color homage to B-movies is a dizzying display of camp that clearly affirms Smith’s role as the driving force behind underground cinema and performance art of the post-war era. The director was known to constantly re-edit the film, often during screenings as it was still unspooling from the projector.

  Normal Love

  1965 · 11 votes

• Movie

  Documentary

  In his essay film, Jerry Tartaglia, longtime archivist and restorer of the film estate of queer New York underground, experimental film, and performance legend Jack Smith, deals less with Smith’s life than with his work, analyzing Smith’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in 21 thematic chapters. It's a film essay about the artist’s work, rather than a documentary about his life. An unmediated vision of Jack Smith, an invitation to join him in his lost paradise.

  Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith

  2017

• Movie5.1

  Drama

  Filmed in New York in 1964, completed in London 1967.

  Naissant

  1964 · 14 votes

• Movie4.3

  DramaFantasy

  Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

  The Illiac Passion

  1967 · 7 votes

• Movie

  Documentary

  Initially titled "Books for all". A moving institutional commission in which the filmmakers lovingly portray New Jersey's public library system.

  Library

  1970

• Movie7.5

  One of Andy Warhol's screen tests, focusing on an actor's face for 4-5 mins.

  Screen Test #3

  1966 · 2 votes

• Movie4.5

  Romance

  His Oriental predator is at first clothed in black, her 'victim' in white; slowly the costumes change, the victim acquiring a veil of mourning, until finally - as if to underline the ambiguity and interchangeability of their respective roles - the colours are reversed altogether. Still more interesting is the way in which, as the game becomes more ambiguous, Dwoskin adds fresh layers of make-up to his characters' faces, until they become almost caricature masks of their original selves.

  Chinese Checkers

  1965 · 8 votes

• Movie4.8

  HorrorComedy

  Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.

  Flaming Creatures

  1963 · 63 votes