This Week in the Mercury
Friday, September 16, 2011
Performance Dean & Britta: 13 Most Beautiful
Posted by Virginia Thayer on Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:33 AM
Hey demographic, you're about my age, right? Which means we're too young to remember Andy Warhol's experimental art scene of the 60s but old enough to have died of an overdose by now if we'd been a part of it.
And so it went for several of the silent Screen Tests subjects chosen by Dean & Britta (from some 500 filmed by Warhol) as the 13 Most Beautiful.
The idea of playing songs in front of projected film doesn't sound like anything novel or experimental, but there was actually something unusual about this show: it's an equal marriage of film and rock show. I kept trying to figure out whether the focus was really on the film or the music. Andy Warhol is a bigger name than Dean & Britta, but the musicians were the live performers here. After a while I had to tell myself to stop trying to classify it and accept that it was both.
The films in question, from Warhol's Screen Tests series, are each a few minutes of very subtle black and white footage of young, beautiful people doing nothing much. Staring at the camera, blinking, smoking, drinking, looking around, you get the idea—all starkly lit, and with Dean & Britta playing a live score of very chill, psychedelic folk-rock. But the finale was the most erotic teeth-brushing scene I've ever witnessed. Here is a clip that is all too short:
Aside from that, though, the part I was most fascinated by were the stories that Dean and Britta told in between songs/films, filling in the backstory of these mysterious people: their relationship with Andy Warhol and their strange and untimely demises, such as, "he got out of the bath and danced naked out of his fifth floor window."
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