andy warhol as filmmaker

They had something like that at the Tate earlier this year, I think?

well, that's another can of worms really, cinema in a gallery bidness. i don't really mean minimalist cinema, no, because it's boring i think that's what this stuff got categorized as during the 70s when it went legitimate... i'm for robert frank, ron rice, jim mcbride.

I missed this whole season! Almost. I did see "The Velvet Underground & Nico", which is groovy. And "The Velvet Underground", which is shit.

Tho the latter is almost worth it to see Lou Reed looking incredibly boyish and cute and doing some embarassingly weird frugging

NYC series in Astoria, starting next weekend:

http://www.movingimage.us/site/screenings/mainpage/andy_warhol.html

thanks
i think i'll see chelsea girls

Fuck, didn't they just do a Warhol series a few months ago?

i liked the one about the building
i watched four hours and i thought "i want to pee on that"

Not that I remember, Colin.

Hoberman: For the next four weekends, the Museum of the Moving Image will be screening vintage Warhol in what may be the largest such event since Warhol's own Edie Sedgwick retrospective back in the day...

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0742,hoberman,78062,20.html

loooooooool

xpost

oh, duh -- J.H. sez AMMI did Sedgwick last year

wouldn't sleep go see Sleep?

Chelsea Girls was riveting the first time, and I went in with misgivings.

There's no baseball, at least during the day, this weekend so I might try to hit AMMI Sat or Sun.

yea well they're only showing an excerpt! weeeak
i might have to go see the velvet underground + nico as well. we'll see.

on my way to the 2 & 4, if trains work.

No mention of the Curiosity Killed the Cat "Misfit" video! No credibility!

About 30 ppl at Saturday's 2pm screening; maybe a dozen walkouts.

Unblinking Eye, Visual Diary: Warhol’s Films
By MANOHLA DARGIS

“OUR movies may have looked like home movies,” Andy Warhol wrote, responding to one of his critics, “but then our home wasn’t like anybody else’s.” From 1963 through 1968 Warhol shot hundreds of these home movies, work that is short and dauntingly long, silent and sound, scripted and improvised, often in black and white though also in color, still as death and alive to its moment. Awkward, beautiful, raw, spellbinding, radical — they are films like few others, in part because, first and foremost, they are also sublime art.

Through Nov. 11 the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is presenting a 33-title retrospective of his work, including new prints of films like his 1966 sensation “The Chelsea Girls”; a sampling of the 472 “Screen Tests” he shot of Susan Sontag, Lou Reed and other fabulous scene-makers; and excerpts from early minimalist epics like the eight-hour “Empire” (1964) and the 5-hour 21-minute “Sleep” (1963). The museum will also present “A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” a documentary about a filmmaker who had been one of Warhol’s intimates, and “Beautiful Darling,” a work in progress about Candy Darling, a notable figure in what the museum is calling “Warhol’s World.” For film lovers there is no more important show in town.

In the years since his death in 1987 from a heart attack at 58 (or thereabouts), after undergoing gall bladder surgery, Warhol has continued to make money and headlines with his fine art even as his films have remained largely from view. In May a new record for his work was set at a New York auction when a 1963 painting of a car crash was sold to an anonymous buyer for $71.7 million. (You can buy your very own Warhol magnet for $4 at warholstore.com.) Meanwhile, in the 2006 fiction film “Factory Girl,” about Edie Sedgwick, his most famous superstar, Warhol’s already creepy mainstream profile reaches its nadir with a portrait of the artist as the embodiment of 1960s urban decadence, a gay vampire sucking the life out of an innocent led astray.

Warhol didn’t destroy Ms. Sedgwick, who died from barbiturate intoxication in 1971 after leaving New York and his circle; rather, in films like “Vinyl,” “Kitchen,” “Beauty #2,” “Poor Little Rich Girl” and “Outer and Inner Space” (all 1965 and all essential), he seems to grab hold of time and hold it still, capturing the moth moments before it fluttered too close to the flame. To be sure there’s a touch of the macabre to her appearance in his 1965 film “Lupe,” in which she plays out the last moments of the Hollywood actress Lupe Velez, who tried to stage a beautiful suicide and ended up wrapped around a toilet bowl, but only because Ms. Sedgwick herself provided the fatal postscript. The dread that Warhol’s sexuality inspired is nothing new. On the first page of his memoir “Popism: The Warhol Sixties,” written with Pat Hackett, he explains that Pop artists “did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles — all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” About 10 pages later he adds one other item to the list of things that some Abstract Expressionists tried hard not to notice: homosexuality. “You’re too swish,” his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, bluntly dropped, when Warhol asked why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg didn’t like him. “And that upsets them.”

Warhol’s success as a commercial artist, exemplified by his award-winning illustrations for the shoe company I. Miller that ran in this paper, didn’t help his reputation with serious or self-serious artists either. Though hurt by the disdain, Warhol decided he “wasn’t going to care, because those were all things that I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I should want to change.” He added, “And as for the ‘swish’ thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that — just watching the expressions on people’s faces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish.”

That swish thing is critical to Warhol’s films, where beautiful butch boys in tight jeans and leather jackets share the screen with transvestites in elegant dime-store drag. Ms. Sedgwick may have been his most famous superstar (at least the one now most likely to adorn a book jacket), and plenty of women crossed in front of his camera. But it’s all the male bodies — adorned, adored and at times stripped bare — that underscore the radical politics of Warhol’s gaze. In films like “Couch” (1964), which features some salacious banana eating (including by the film critic Amy Taubin), as well as images of men having sex in front of casual and diffident observers, Warhol presents gay desire as something perfectly ordinary, which in and of itself was extraordinary.

With his films Warhol broke with the received ideas of what was possible — specifically, what cinema is and can be — much as he had helped do with his Pop paintings. He wasn’t the first avant-garde filmmaker to represent gay desire, send up Hollywood, flatten cinematic space or call attention to the material properties of the medium, and his work shows the imprint of avant-garde notables like Marie Menken, Kenneth Anger and especially Jack Smith, who also appears in several Warhol titles, including “Camp” (1965), which seems to be a direct response to Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay on the subject. We aren’t “camping,” one woman says in the film, putting a stranglehold on the camera with her crazy eyes. “This is who we are.”

Yet in Warhol’s films the illusions of Hollywood, with its seamless narratives and industrial imperatives, are self-consciously replaced by other illusions, notably those pertaining to identity. The performers in his films play a shifting catalog of roles — biker boy, hustler, debutante, faded movie queen, aged grand artiste — that are simultaneously constructed and poignantly real. This is who we are, each seems to say, whether aggressively staring into (or perhaps, more accurately, staring down) the camera or pretending to ignore it altogether. Though Warhol rarely appears on camera, the films feel profoundly autobiographical; they’re individualistic records of the world in which he played, made art and helped construct his own slippery, elusive identity. They are part ethnography, part memento mori and wholly personal.

Warhol withdrew his 1960s films from circulation around 1970, two years after he was almost shot to death by Valerie Solanas, a freaked-out feminist who makes a startling appearance in a stairwell in his 1967 film “I, a Man.” (She harasses the film’s title character, a hustling Adonis whose supposed “squishy” rear end she derides.) While Warhol was in the hospital recuperating, Paul Morrissey, the name most associated with Warhol’s cinematic output, directed the feature-length narrative “Flesh.” After recovering from his wounds, at least physically, Warhol made only one other film himself, “Blue Movie” (in which a man and woman have coitus uninterruptus), in the fall of 1968. Mr. Morrissey directed other films, including “Andy Warhol’s Dracula” and “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” which Warhol helped produce.

The Morrissey titles may ring bells (some are on DVD) but have nothing to do with the aesthetic concerns and formal brilliance of Warhol’s own films. At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.

In 1966 Warhol began screening his films as part of multimedia extravaganzas initially called the Erupting Plastic Inevitable that he, the Velvet Underground and other Factory members mounted at the Dom, a Polish dance hall turned discotheque on St. Marks Place. (Erupting later grew into Exploding.) Warhol and others projected films like “Empire” and “Vinyl,” slipping colored gels over the images, while the Velvets bombarded eardrums, strobe lights pulsed and the demimonde danced with the uptown gawkers. To publicize the event Warhol and company took out a newspaper ad for the opening that seductively beckoned with the words “Come Blow Your Mind.” Rarely has there been so much truth in advertising.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

It occurred to me a while ago that the place to see Warhol's films is not in a cinema but in an art gallery, as part of some kind of video-style installation work. I was able to test this in the Niland Gallery in Sligo on Saturday, where they have an Andy Warhol exhibition on. The screen tests and the Velvet Underground film were great to sit and watch for a bit before wandering off to play with the silver balloons.

My beloved and I are still trying to work out whether the unquiet Americans were part of the exhibition or not.

warhol's films have probably been more seen in art galleries than in cinemas, on the whole. 'chelsea girls' got a big release in '66, but since then...

that's kind of fair because cinemas should be used for proper films rather than the fucking "screen tests" of a bunch of self-important narcissists who, a couple of reluctant exceptions excepted, left nothing of value except... their connection to andy warhol's factory scene.

jokes.

i watch bootleg DVDs of "chelsea girls" and the screen tests all the time while I'm working on sound. It's like a visual way of putting the radio on; to put it awkwardly but accurately, they are never not beautiful. "Chelsea Girls" can be quite brutally depressing, and that deliberate "bringdown" factor is rarely discussed when people talk about Warhol; they tend to focus on glamour and starpower and iconography, but when you really listen to Ondine and Eric talking in their long rants in "Chelsea Girls" it is super uncomfortable. The screen tests are a different thing entirely; they are like stained glass windows of saints or something.

The jabbering of the 3 guys on the soundtrack to Harlot, which gets a little tedious once Mario Montez pulls out his fourth banana, sort of sounds like a minimalist forerunner to Mystery Science Theater 3000.

so they showed a 46-min excerpt of Empire (the 8-hour fixed shot of the Empire State Building) on Saturday, and as I anticipated, the audience interaction was the drama. A group of 4 or 5 came in late, fairly noisily -- I heard plastic bracelets clattering throughout -- and there was giggling and whispered WTFs after 10 minutes.

MAN #1: Will you be quiet?

#2: No.

#3: Yes, do.

#4: For you youngsters, you were supposed to talk during this movie, and have a cigarette.

The noisy party left after another 10 minutes, with a woman huffing "Eight hours of that!"

This is a handy "star" guide:

http://www.warholstars.org/index.html

"The noisy party left after another 10 minutes, with a woman huffing "Eight hours of that!"

-- Dr Morbius, Monday, October 29, 2007 7:15 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link"

what a SQUARE huh.

am kind of amazed that the audience was WTFing this. it'd be like going to 'hear' 3'33 and then going -- OMG WHERE THE TUNE!?!?!?!

Yeah, walking out not as puzzling as WALKING IN!

The Chelsea Girls: still fastest 3-1/2 hrs in cinema

I lost interest about half way through.

“A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” a documentary about a filmmaker who had been one of Warhol’s intimates,

I watched this tonight. I really liked the excerpts of Danny's films!

Very sad news from the Warhol as filmmaker front. Callie Angell, curator of The Andy Warhol Film Project, has died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/arts/artsspecial/11angell.html?hpw

Quite eerie for me because just yesterday I was reading about her in Roy Grundmann's amazing book on Blow Job.

just saw her speak at the 0rph4ns symposium a month ago! by all accounts this was very sudden. RIP.

lol @ $74.50 for a 280-page analysis of a 35-minute film of a guy making sex faces

am nailing it in first post basically

xpost

Oddly enough, that's not the only book on the film. There's a much cheaper one by the great, albeit a bit hardline, avant-garde filmmaker/polemicist Peter Gidal.

Also, the anthology Pop Out: Queer Warhol has an absolutely superb essay by Jonathan Flatley called “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia.” Don't let "Prosopopoeia" scare you off (or let your mind drift towards Mexican desserts) - it's an easy to digest essay explaining some of Warhol's preoccupations, with a good chunk on Blow Job.

http://www.ubu.com/film/rice_chumlum.html

Ron Rice ws discussed up there hence the link - this is...Parajanov before Parajanov? Just w/a bunch of bohemian NY-ers -- except not nearly as well made, but the overload of images with the music has a trance to it.

if chelsea girls is one of warhol's best movies, i'd hate to see his worst

Saw this old documentary on Warhol's films:

http://www.ubu.com/film/warhol_cinema.html

Lots of great clips -- got v excited about seeing Chelsea Girls. Hoberman alluded to rolling news and you could easily add reality TV to this now.

Anyway it looked boring and great too. A must see.

I love seeing docs about Warhol because of interviews w/old factory members. They seem like aliens from a far away galaxy.

Best left at a distance i think.

i saw a 2-screen projection of chelsea girls a few months ago, it was cool

I saw some of the National Gallery's Warhol retrospective this past fall. If you ask me the Warhol estate is doing the world a favor by limiting these films' distribution. (Only Ondine made Chelsea Girls tolerable.)

I'm leading a panel w/Tom Kalin and Claire K. Henry of the Whitney Museum on Nov. 20 discussing Lupe, Hedy, and Harlot. Anyone seen'em?

rather, point me to a couple of good articles I can cite

Stephen Koch's Stargazer is still the locus classicus on Warhol's films

Saw Kitchen last week, Poor Little Rich Girl tonight, five or six more in the coming weeks. Still mulling over Kitchen. "I suspect that a hundred years from now people will look at Kitchen and say, 'Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That's why they had the war in Vietnam. That's why the rivers were getting polluted. That's why there was typological glut. That's why the horror came down. That's why the plague was on its way.' Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time." Norman Mailer in Edie...Wish I could get him to expand on that. (He does, a bit--the full quote is longer.) I sort of get it--there's a real feeling of violence in a couple of Edie Sedgwick's outbursts--but for me the experience of actually watching it didn't match the intrigue of that quote. Occasional lines made me laugh, and I will remember Sedgwick's getup (I liked how, when Warhol wanders into the film, you realize why two or three of them are wearing striped shirts). I think I drifted off for about 10 minutes.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GDut44PSbmg/hqdefault.jpg

I enjoyed Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort Of for short stretches. Kitchen and Poor Little Rich Girl are so heavily invested in Edie Sedgwick, I think you've got to find her as endlessly fascinating as Warhol does to get much out of them. She mostly just wore me down. Taylor Mead, who came from the stage, is simply better in front of the camera--his vamping and clowning around is very funny at times. (The whole film seems to be predicated on the question "How do you make a Tarzan film?" "If your lead actor wears a loincloth and remembers to beat his chest every minute or two, it's a Tarzan film.") Throw in some deadpan voice-over ("This is the bathtub scene...it's endless"), the Orlons and Little Eva and lots of other girl-group stuff (felt much more like a Kenneth Anger film than the other two, even though Poor Little Rich Girl also has a pop-heavy soundtrack), Dennis Hopper and Irving Blum (recognized him from the Ric Burns documentary; also Claes Oldenburg and the director James Bridges), and some nudity, and it’s halfway lively. It walks up to the edge of a couple of really dark corners--bestiality (for laughs) and pedophilia--but glancingly. Eighty minutes; 40 would have been enough. Dionne Warwick overtop color footage of Naomi Levine swimming was the highlight for me. Beautiful, sort of.

Lonesome Cowboys is the usual mixture of tedium and funny, sometimes deadpan (and sometimes not) camp, the best of it from Taylor Mead, who I'm pretty sure is stoned throughout. Loved "Magical Mystery Tour."

I must have slept through a quarter of Nude Restaurant's 100 minutes, including much of the beginning and end (which included some of the Taylor Mead/Julian Burroughs scene, which seems to be the film's most famous). I had been contemplating skipping it altogether earlier--knew I was tired, and reading up a little beforehand I thought "Do I really want to see this?"

Anyway, actually enjoyed a lot of the rest. I'm now convinced that Mead is a borderline comic genius. He's even funny when he's not saying anything (e.g., the whole time he's listening to Viva), and he's great at mocking the very existence of these films, like when he finishes his song and says "And now I'd like to order something from the menu," extra-large quotation marks around "menu." I also found Viva much more entertaining that Sedgwick in the two films I posted about earlier. Loved the monologue about her psychiatrist, and her derision of mass media is better than Dylan and the Time reporter: "We're beginning to sound like Newsweek. 'Hippiedom. Trouble in Hippiedom.'" I hope that somewhere, sometime, somebody named their band Trouble in Hippiedom.

Pretty detailed piece here:

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/10/02/letting-it-all-hang-out-at-the-nude-restaurant/

For 40 years, the only films I'd seen Viva in were Midnight Cowboy and Cisco Pike. I've seen her in three Warhols now--saw Bike Boy tonight--and I think she's fantastic. And again, she and Ingrid Superstar and Brigid Polk seem so much more interesting and funny to me than Sedgwick.

(IMDB lists Valerie Solanas as "Woman on street" in Bike Boy. I either missed her--I don't even remember seeing the street--or, my guess, she was excised from the film.)

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjAzMDg2MDQzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzI2MzAyOA@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg

I don't think that worked, anyway, don't forget her appearance in "Play It Again, Sam"! And on "Escalator Over the Hill".

Forgot about that...Haven't seen it in a while, so I can't quite remember her in it--I always think of Susan Anspach and the art-gallery woman in Play It Again. I've never heard "Escalator Over the Hill"--interesting.

37th anniversary of his death. Played parts of three Screen Tests (Mary Woronov, Nico, Dylan) for a grade 7 class, the first two with music from the Dean & Britta LP 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. No idea what they thought.

"Anybody love those?" (no reaction)
"Anybody hate those?" (no reaction)

Maybe their blank stares were meant as a tribute to Warhol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHq9OEj4SvQ