andy warhol as filmmaker

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.

I really enjoyed a lot of this series--all the stuff that made me think about stuff--but Mrs. Warhol was not a good way to end. An hour of Warhol's mother puttering around the kitchen while Richard Rheem, about 50 years her junior, kind of half humors her and half affectionately mocks her. I think it's supposed to be charming; I was bored out of my mind.

Nude Restaurant screens in Brooklyn tomw night

http://www.bam.org/film/2016/the-nude-restaurant

Saw newly restored Drunk aka Drink last night. Emile de Antonio, bolting J&B, is a riot in the first reel, just sad in the second. Catch it when you can.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/2521?locale=en

a lot of NYC cinephiles are excited about tomorrow's screening of Empire at the Whitney

but, y'know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSIOK5Jj8g

"Kiss" by Andy Warhol (1963–64) is now streaming through @MoMAFilm in a newly restored edition. Could be the first time a Warhol 16mm classic has legally appeared on the inner nets. https://t.co/FqJHxHrmTK

— Dave Kehr (@dave_kehr) August 13, 2020

Blow Job, Chelsea Girls, Vinyl and more available as legit rentable streams!

https://stream.warhol.org/browse

My friend and I did a Zoomcast on Scorpio Rising, Vinyl, and Pink Flamingos (their soundtracks being the link.) I hadn't seen Vinyl in a long time, but I've really come to love it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqxkK_qmf8c&t

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