Lily in Wonderland

Lily (Cathryn Harrison) flees a global conflict and finds refuge in a mysterious country estate in the 1975 fantasy BLACK MOON, which is partly inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

Louis Malle has never been the sort of filmmaker critics could easily pigeonhole in terms of his style and interests. He’s worked in practically every film genre (thriller, social satire, melodrama, documentary, etc.) and his restless curiosity has led him to explore a vast array of subjects from underwater life (The Silent World, 1956) to sexual liberation (The Lovers, 1958) to life under the Nazi occupation (Au Revoir, Les Enfants, 1987). Yet, for even an iconoclast like Malle, his 1975 film Black Moon is unlike anything he’s ever done before or since. “Opaque, sometimes clumsy, it is the most intimate of my films,” he once said. “I see it as a strange voyage to the limits of the medium, or maybe my own limits.” 

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Face Time

Edie Sedgwick in one of the famous Andy Warhol Screen Tests

For most people the films of Andy Warhol were more fun to read about then to actually watch. In the case of films such as the 485-minute Empire (1964) or Sleep (1963), at 321 minutes, it’s hard to imagine someone watching these in their entirety in one sitting. I don’t even think Warhol expected viewers to watch these in real time but to wander in and out of the screenings like you would at a video installation. But even at revivals of the most popular and infamous Warhol titles such as The Chelsea Girls (1966) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), you can bet on numerous walkouts during the screenings, not from outrage but boredom or disinterest. At the other end of the scale, however, are the short, silent black and white films he made when he was first experimenting with the medium and his Screen Test series shows a brilliance of concept and execution that could easily turn naysayers into converts.