Michel Auder

One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

Documentary portrait of Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

The Chronicles capture the natural and cultural beauty of Morocco from its ancient walled villages to its nomadic caravans. Music comes from everywhere. Edited almost thirty years apart, the two Chronicles together are a study in Auder's approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same trip that was a family vacation. Considering Chronicles/Morocco, 1971 a construct of emotional convenience unfaithful to memory, Auder decided to supplement the first version with a fuller account. The two works feature almost entirely different footage. There are, however, sections where one can see where Auder has omitted Viva. The star of the 1971 version is a young Moroccan Adonis who appoints himself tour-guide for a group of Europeans including Michel. The camera follows his charming antics as he flaunts his nubile body and rather blunt but effective skills as a hunter.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Warhol Superstars Viva and Louis Waldon are the main subjects of Auder’s first film with synched sound, Keeping Busy (1969), which was billed as “a film novel about what they did to keep busy.”

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

“FUN AND GAMES (FOR EVERYONE): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset's exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo... the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” - Philippe Azoury

From its fiery outset, Brooding Angles is decidedly gothic and the mood anxious. It is a dark rumination on the specter of authority, resistance and paranoia marking the close of Reagan's second term in office. Born in 1945, Auder came of age during the 1960s, a decade as tumultuous in France as it was in the United States. The decade culminated in the student/worker strikes of May 1968 that shut down the city of Paris. Auder's value system was in many respects shaped by this anti-authoritarian milieu. Its remnants are to be found in his preponderance with issues violence and conflict as they serve to question moral progress. The soundtrack's ominous melody is recycled from footage of cellist David Soyer that can be seen in A Portrait of Alice Neel.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

Reel-to-reel video by Michel Auder, recorded 1971, edited 2009. Features Auder's former wife Viva.

Phone video by Michel Auder.

The thrill of cocaine becomes a metaphor for the consumption of images in this short montage. The title and lyrics come from Auder´s friend and 2001 Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Jacques Shuhl. The piece is composed entirely of still photographs from a variety of books and magazines that simultaneously reveal and feed an addiction to spectacle. With a source that is once removed, Auder's scopophilia is symptomatic of society at large. The song is performed by legendary chanteuse Ingrid Caven. Suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, Canven's seasoned voice compliments Auder's selection of images which dwell on the themes of death, destruction and desire. The melody is classic cabaret performed by a piano/violin duo who dramatically heighten the works already dark eroticism.

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1967 (made in 2015) presents newly found and digitized silent 16mm films from the 1960s in the form of a four-part composition portraying a cast of artists, writers, musicians and actors who made up the bohemian underground of that time. The film recasts the essence of a scene whose participants have since been idealized as celebrities or else forgotten.

A portrait of Rome that would have made Plutarch proud, Roman Variations was made during a residency at a studio provided by the gallerist Barbara Gladstone.

Michel reads a book about love, with pictures of naked ladies flashing by and a song by Laurie Anderson playing in the background.

In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'. Michel Auder, hiding behind a Yucca (or some such exotic plant), films the girl telling this story. She develops her 'story' circumventing and encompassing this nothing-thing, and she does it in a hypnotizing and repetitive way, like a mantra, using all the permutations possible with a minimum amount of words or facts.


Michel Auder’s Jesus – in which underground NY artists and Warhol superstars openly discuss their beliefs. Jesus – which premiered as a screening at The Kitchen in 1980 – mixes documentary elements such as footage of evangelical TV programs, books, cartoons, paintings, and other Jesus related imagery – with performances including Taylor Mead as a priest in the West Village and Florence Lambert playing a crucified Jesus. Also, intercut throughout are surprisingly candid interviews with Auder’s friends, family, and people he approaches on New York City streets about their faith and relationship to the world’s most famous person. Among those interviewed are Diego Cortez, Jackie Curtis, Gerard Malanga, Alice Neel (Andrew Neel’s grandmother), Larry Rivers, and Viva.

In 1969 Michel Auder began a series of video diaries that chronicled the art scene in downtown New York. In Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, Auder captures revealing moments in Warhol's public and private life: the opening of the 1970 Whitney Museum retrospective, a party held at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's home, a heated telephone conversation between Warhol, Viva and Brigid Berlin, and an illuminating interview conducted with Larry Rivers, the grandfather of Pop Art, following the publication of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975. The issue of money is a consistent topic of conversation with Viva, who after departing the Factory in 1969 sent Warhol a series of threatening letters demanding money.