A Walk into the Sea.

"Danny Williams, subject of Esther Robinson's documentary portrait A Walk into the Sea, was a 60s casualty," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "His brief life derives cultural significance from his association with the Silver Age of the Warhol Factory - and a particular poignance in that the survivors of that epoch barely remember him."

"[A]s Robinson plumbs deeper into what her uncle's emotional state might have been in the weeks and months leading up to his unexplained departure, what her film becomes is not only a haunting whodunit and a glimpse inside a nasty, ruthless artistic environment, but also an example of the limits of nonfiction biography," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Updated through 12/15.

"Seeing the images of laughing, giddy and glamorously decadent Warholians compared to how they look in the unblinking bright light of today is rather sobering. (Read: Yikes!)" yelps the New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson.

"Their scars and insecurities - still visible 40 years on - come off as humanizing foibles rather than demonizing vices," writes Benjamin Sutton, introducing his interview with Robinson for the New York Press.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Robinson "about Warhol's continuing influence, spending high school dressed as Edie Sedgwick, and how Stranger Than Paradise changed her life."

Earlier: E Steven Fried talks with Robinson at the Siffblog, parts 1 and 2.

Updates, 12/14: "Ms Robinson, who is Mr Williams's niece, does a pretty good job of reconstructing the creative and psychological whirlwind around Warhol," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "His critics and his apologists have their say, as do old associates whose ambivalence is as acute now as it must have been in the mid-60s. The conflicting, occasionally harmonizing testimony of Brigid Berlin, John Cale, Paul Morrissey and others is fascinating, but Danny Williams himself remains the missing piece, despite clips from 16-millimeter films he shot."

"The filmmaker Ronald Nameth attests to Williams's little-known behind-the-camera success in taking the Factory cast in a very different cinematic direction than the one Mr. Morrissey and others pursued under Warhol's aegis," notes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Those who made up the Warhol crowd, says the Velvet Underground's John Cale, were mostly 'incomplete people who found a certain completion' in the sybaritic, narcissistic, and competitive Factory scene. Though it is a marvelous oral history of a time and place rarely explored with such unromantic honesty, the haunting thing about A Walk Into the Sea is that it gently exposes the ultimately fatal psychic wounds that Danny Williams received at the Factory and those he brought with him."

"A Walk in the Sea is at its best when Robinson contrasts the haziness of the Warhol crowd with the specificity of Williams's family, who can recall every anecdote he ever told them, including every perceived slight," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "To them, Warhol and company are those creeps from New York who treated their boy badly, and then wouldn't help find him when he disappeared. And in a way, Robinson follows her relatives' lead."

Update, 12/15: IndieWIRE interviews Robinson.

Posted by dwhudson at December 13, 2007 10:04 AM