Screen Picks

The Velvet Underground Film Festival (Fri.-Sat., March 22-23, 8 and 10 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art + Design, 20th & Race sts., 215-568-4515, ext. 4099, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart) Secret Cinema’s anniversary gala continues with an expanded reprise of the most popular program in its 10-year history. The centerpiece of the 100-minute program is Andy Warhol’s The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound, the 1966 film that represents the only vintage synch-sound footage of a Velvet Underground performance (although not technically the only footage, since a performance from the band’s 1992 reunion dates was released on video). Recorded at Warhol’s infamous Factory, the film captures the then-quintet a year before the release of their first-album, including glimpses of the kinds of elongated drones they wouldn’t fully release on the record-buying public until their second album, White Light/White Heat. New York Psychiatrists Convention Footage, a brief entry by experimental filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas, documents the very first Velvets performance on Jan. 14, 1966, with a soundtrack taped at a later but still early-on gig. Closing out is a new addition to the program, also of 1966 vintage: Ron Namath’s Warhol’s E.P.I. As any Warhol or Velvets aficionado can tell you, "E.P.I." stands for "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," Warhol’s psychedelic light/slide show and performance art extravaganza in which the Velvets played a central role. Namath, a sometime colleague of John Cage, duplicates the E.P.I.’s sensory overload with flash cuts, overlapping dissolves and a VU soundtrack, including several album tracks as well as two live songs featuring a unique lineup: John Cale on keyboards, Sterling Morrison on guitar, Maureen Tucker on bass (!) and founding member Angus MacLise on drums. (Lou Reed was hospitalized for hepatitis at the time, and Nico had already decamped to Ibiza.) The effect is sure to be somewhere between intense and ridiculous, which is exactly how Warhol would’ve wanted it.

Hi-Tech Triple Feature (Fri., March 22, Sundance Channel) The history of the internet in less than five hours? Not quite. But Sundance’s three-shot of e-docs covers a lot of ground, from the battle over open-source software to the fall of Kozmo.com. The series kicks off at 6 p.m. with Revolution O.S. , J.T.S. Moore’s valedictory to the men and women (OK, men) of the open-source movement, dedicated to the proposition that all software (particularly the source code, sort of the building blocks of computer programming) should be available to the public and not proprietary (i.e., owned by Microsoft). An esoteric subject, to be sure, but hardly a marginal one. At 7:25 is Wonsuk Chin’s e-dreams , which chronicles the downfall of Kozmo.com, whose promise to deliver everything from video rentals to candy bars to consumers for an inflated price is an irresistible metaphor for the delusional boom in web-based conveniences. Concentrating more on the mania than the men, e-dreams is less skeptical of dot-boom rhetoric than Startup.com , which follows it at 9 p.m. For those who haven’t seen the latter, assuredly one of last year’s best documentaries, it’s clear that filmmakers Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim prefer human drama to stories of success or failure — the movie’s heart is the contentious and eventually imperiled friendship between the founders of GovWorks.com. (Incidentally, Kozmo was one of the startups Hegedus and Noujaim considered following in their initial stages.) Exactly what lessons are to be learned from these two stories of millions flushed away is open to debate, but it’s a sure bet that someone, somewhere should learn them, and quick.

The Zone: Low at the First Unitarian Church (Fri., March 22, 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.; Thu., March 28, 5 p.m., DUTV-54) If you missed Low’s mesmerizing performance at the First Unitarian Church last year, or you just want to savor the melancholy sounds of the Duluth trio again, tune in to DUTV’s music showcase (and watch for a re-broadcast of the show featuring local avant-everything maniacs Need New Body on April 12).