The Mechanics of Love

“Andy Warhol called Marie Menken and Willard Maas ‘the last of the great bohemians,’ and, in 1965, made Bitch, his real-life parody of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Willard and Marie sitting on the couch in their living room, drunk and arguing on a Sunday afternoon. Unscripted, shot with a stationary camera in his signature home-movie documentary style, Warhol’s Bitch has never before been seen by the public—until now…” (Philip Gefter).

In 1963 Boultenhouse wrote, produced, and directed Dionysius,which he described as a “free treatment of Euripides' The Bacchae.”It starred the dancers Louis Falco, Anna Duncan, and Nicolas Magallanes as Dionysius, Agave, and Pentheus respectively, and the experimental filmmakers Charles Levine, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams and William Wood as the Chorus of Cameras. The film's score was by Teiji Ito.

Filmed at the Alhambra in Spain in just one day, according to Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger concentrates on visual details found in Moorish architecture and in ancient Spanish tile. The date 1961 refers to the addition of Teiji Ito's soundtrack and its subsequent completion, but the film was likely shot in 1960 or earlier. - David Lewis

A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a hand, the tips of fingers, toes. Occasionally, the frame includes a larger scape of a body: a chest, a back, a breast. Usually the camera is stationery; sometimes, it moves across a body, remaining in close up. They hold hands for one moment. The bodies are without clothes; no genitalia are visible.

A young male protagonist dreams of a muscleman hero, a black dancer, and a princess who gives him a magic urn. When he wakes he rejects his mother (Menken) and wanders the cold streets, where he finds his dream characters corrupted or dying.

Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations is a portrait of Warhol's famous installation of floating silver helium-filled balloons at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. Willard Maas's lyrical "film poem" is the only visual document of this seminal exhibition.

Andy Warhol directs a single 35-minute shot of a man's face to capture his facial expressions as he receives the sexual act depicted in the title.

A fragment of an abandoned, long work concerning St. Teresa of Avila. A sexual orgy symbolizing the decadance of modern society. Maas, who acts in this film, plays the devil while a wild orgy goes on in his living-room. There is the fantastic drag queen doing her job in the bathroom while frenzied love-making, to the incomparable baroque-jazz music of Tiji Ito, is carried on in Maas's baroque apartment. The camera in bird-swift flight depicts a scene of total decadence as Andy Warhol's Jackie Kennedy careens through the air. By way of explanation: the opening scene shows the director handing out masks to the actors-the same ones used in LSD WALL by John Hawkins. The taking of LSD was part of the original script.

"A realism like that of GREED is lifted to a level where it becomes poetry. This is done by stylization and a few well-chosen details... a masterpiece." –Jonas Mekas, Village Voice "A black comedy which, in its cruel ending, has been compared to Harold Pinter. It is a hilarious satire on the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Everything is there but the soup, but it's nuts for sure. This is Mass' first comedy, and those who know his early classic works are in for some surprises. Also Hawkins' imitations of sobs, snores, and gobbles are fabulous, especially the ghostly turkey at the end, shot in negative. A favorite on Mass' recent tours of Texas, the Midwest and the South." –The Gryphon Film Group

Photography: Willard Maas and John Hawkins. "Looking down instead of around, while walking, finding the magic patterns in the pavements of a city."--John Hawkins