The best Ronald Tavel’s movies
We present our ranking of the best Ronald Tavel’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Ronald Tavel.
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
7.4/10
In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Kitchen
6.6/10
Instructed by Warhol to write a vehicle for Edie Sedgwick in a “completely white” setting, scenarist Ronald Tavel created one of Warhol’s most iconic films. Here a group of performers of all stripes – the sink and litter basket receive equal billing to the human actors – are forced into Warhol and Tavel’s cruelly comical theatre of the absurd. Inside this cramped domestic space, boredom, confusion and a sense of existential dread hang heavy in the air. Warhol and Tavel transform the modern 1960s kitchen – replete with the latest gadgets and conveniences – into a chaotic laboratory for self-creation and interpersonal conflict.
The Life of Juanita Castro
5.8/10
A playwright taunts a number of actors into improvising a truly ridiculous but subtlely meaningful meditation on Fidel Castro and his family.
Warhol's Cinema 1963-1968: Mirror for the Sixties
7.1/10
Documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field.
