Beverly Grant

Beverly Grant was an actress and filmmaker who appeared in Andy Warhol films.[1] and collaborated with experimental film-maker Tony Conrad, to whom she is also married. The avant-garde film-maker Jack Smith called Grant "the queen of the underground, both undergrounds."[2]

Career

Grant appeared in Jack Smith's controversial film Flaming Creatures[3] and his second feature film, Normal Love, which began shooting in 1963 as the public scandal surrounding Flaming Creatures was beginning to erupt. In Normal Love, Grant played the role of the Cobra Woman in an erotic coupling with the Mummy, played by Tony Conrad.[4][5] After the shoot, the two began an actual romantic engagement off the set, causing a falling out with Smith, who saw it as a normative, heterosexual coupling out of synch with the ideal of a transgressive, heterotopic eroticism enacted in his films.[6][7][8]

Grant appeared in films by Andy Warhol, including the unfinished Batman Dracula (1964) and Screen Text 121 Beverly Grant (Hair) (1964),[9][10] and 13 Most Beautiful Women, as well as films by Gregory Markopolous. In her Warhol Screen Text, Grant impersonated an anguished silent movie diva, pulling her hair.[11]

In the late 1960s, Grant was working in Off-Off Broadway experimental theater[12] and taking acting classes.

Grant and Conrad created the feature-length film Coming Attractions (1970), the purely abstract film Straight and Narrow (1970), and Four Square.[13][14] Like Conrad's experimental film The Flicker (1965), Coming Attractions (1970) utilized flicker within narrative film.

In 1972, Conrad and Grant toured Europe, meeting many underground filmmakers.[15]

References

  1. ↑ Ivone Margulies (6 March 2003). Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Duke University Press. pp. 109–. ISBN 0-8223-8461-2.
  2. ↑ Joseph, Branden (2008). Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 272.
  3. ↑ Steven Watson (2003). Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. Pantheon Books. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-0-679-42372-0.
  4. ↑ http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/treasures-iv-american-avant-garde-film-1947-1986
  5. ↑ Jack Sargeant (25 April 2011). Naked Lens. ReadHowYouWant.com. pp. 217–. ISBN 978-1-4596-1918-0.
  6. ↑ Joseph, Branden W. (2008). Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 272.
  7. ↑ Malaga, Gerald (Summer 1967). "Interview with Jack Smith". Film Culture 45: 15.
  8. ↑ MacDonald, Scott (2005). A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 64.
  9. ↑ Callie Angell (1 April 2006). Andy Warhol screen tests: the films of Andy Warhol : catalogue raisonné. H.N. Abrams.
  10. ↑ Christoph Grunenberg; Jonathan Harris; Jonathan P. Harris (1 January 2005). Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s. Liverpool University Press. pp. 1994–. ISBN 978-0-85323-919-2.
  11. ↑ Margulies, Ivone (2003). Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 109.
  12. ↑ Stephen James Bottoms (2004). Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-off-Broadway Movement. University of Michigan Press. pp. 220–. ISBN 0-472-11400-X.
  13. ↑ Joseph, Branden W. (2008). Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. p. 453 n.4.
  14. ↑ Ruth Adams; John Tercier; London Consortium (2000). Whiteness. Lawrence & Wishart. ISBN 978-0-85315-919-3.
  15. ↑ Joseph, Branden (2012). The Roh and the Cooked: Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant in Europe. Berlin: August Verlag.

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