San Francisco Film Society Presents Special Screening of 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests with Live Musical Accompaniment by Dean & Britta

Unique Multimedia Performance at Palace of Fine Arts Features Large-Scale Projection of Iconic Warhol Shorts with Original Music by Indie Pop Duo

December 15, 2008

San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Film Society will present a screening of 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, accompanied by beloved indie pop duo Dean & Britta performing an original score at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, February 3 at the Palace of Fine Arts (3301 Lyon Street).

Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol—nurturing a career-long fascination with the transience of celebrity—created revealing cinematic portraits of the actors, socialites, poets, drag queens and fresh-faced Gotham arrivals that visited the Factory, his New York City studio. These Warhol-appointed “superstars” were asked to pose, lit with a strong key light and filmed with a stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent 100-foot rolls of black-and-white film. The resulting 2-3/4-minute films—known as Screen Tests—were projected in slow motion so that each lasted four minutes. Many were included in shifting compilations and also were used, as were other Warhol films, as part of the light show for the 1966 multimedia happening, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. A selection of Warhol’s Screen Tests, which for many years were rarely seen, will be screened during a unique evening of multimedia performance at the Palace of Fine Arts, with music composed and performed by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the legendary indie rock band Luna and currently making music as Dean & Britta. The duo will perform live onstage with a four-piece band in front of large-scale video projections of a selection of Warhol’s silent “living portraits.” This project is jointly commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

“Dean & Britta are well known for their love of film history—their first album was named after Antonioni’s L’Avventura,” said Film Society Programmer Sean Uyehara. “The group’s languid dream pop sensibilities and sly humor make the perfect complement to Warhol’s vibrant superstars.”

Tickets: $20 for year-round SFFS members; $25 general. A limited number of tickets are available for a post-screening VIP reception at $75. Buy tickets online at sffs.org or by calling 925.866.9559. For more information, visit www.sffs.org.

The San Francisco Film Society is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to celebrating film and the moving image in all its glorious forms. SFFS year-round programs and events are concentrated in four core areas: Celebrating Internationalism; Inspiring Bay Area Youth; Showcasing Bay Area Film Culture; and Exploring New Digital Media. The Film Society shows the best of world cinema year-round on its SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; presents the longest-running film festival in the Americas, the SF International (April 23–May 7, 2009), publishes a daily online magazine, SF360.org, with broad-ranging news and features on Bay Area film and media; and annually reaches more than 7,000 students ages 6–18 with its acclaimed media literacy programs, among many other activities.

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