Michel Auder

The film begins with shots in Venice, passers-by seized from a hotel room, with Tina Aumont. It continues in Morocco during the filming of Bed of the Virgin, in a hotel room, people chat, play the guitar, smoke.

For the past 50 years, Michel Auder has been recording his personal life, creating films and videos that document his own experience and social milieu. His new work, Fictional Art Film, is a composite portrait of Auder’s New York art world during the 70’s and 80’s. The filmmaker recorded his friends, the artists and writers he hung around and admired. These now-famous subjects (which include Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, David Hammons, Hannah Wilke, Willem de Koonig, and Bill T. Jones, among many others) are shown here both as people and performers, with Auder’s footage often blurring the line between life and art.

Video by Michel Auder.

Video recorded in 1986, edited 1993. ”You know you're addicted to heroin when you begin proclaiming every bag to be your last.” Auder says this from experience. Throughout the early and mid 1980s he was an addict. In this candid piece of disclosure he demonstrates a method of smoking heroin referred to as Chasing the Dragon. Drumming his fingers on the table-top while waiting for the high to take effect, heroin use is depicted as a boredom far from bliss. The work ends with Auder in a druginduced stupor, delivering a rambling proclamation about kicking the habit, ”good-bye dope, good bye monkey.”

The Chronicles capture the natural and cultural beauty of Morocco from its ancient walled villages to its nomadic caravans. Music comes from everywhere. Edited almost thirty years apart, the two Chronicles together are a study in Auder's approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same trip that was a family vacation. Considering Chronicles/Morocco, 1971 a construct of emotional convenience unfaithful to memory, Auder decided to supplement the first version with a fuller account. The two works feature almost entirely different footage. There are, however, sections where one can see where Auder has omitted Viva. The star of the 1971 version is a young Moroccan Adonis who appoints himself tour-guide for a group of Europeans including Michel. The camera follows his charming antics as he flaunts his nubile body and rather blunt but effective skills as a hunter.

Video by Michel Auder.

One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

The Feature does not reconcile fact and fiction; instead, it blurs the definitions seemingly represented by the film’s two clearly demarcated registers: that of the archival footage and that of the new, theatrical material. In his guise as “Michel Auder,” living a fulsome and extravagant life, replete with beautiful women and a rock-cut pool overlooking Los Angeles, the art world is revealed as a sham, and his character exhibits a repulsive narcissism. And yet, when caught in quiet moments, something poignant emerges—a glimmer of truth that rebels against the entire endeavour. Or maybe, that’s what makes The Feature.

“FUN AND GAMES (FOR EVERYONE): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset's exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo... the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” - Philippe Azoury

Documentary portrait of Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante