Andy Warhol

5 Warhol and Film

Warhol’s films came to public attention as part of the American underground film movement*, a term that seemed a little unhelpful even at the time.

≡ Term used to describe a loose association of 1960^s American experimental filmmakers. The films were anti-Hollywood and anti-mainstream, and took much of their inspiration from the 1960^s obsession with sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Its practitioners were a diverse group that included among many, many others, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. With hindsight it is hard to see that these film-makers had very much in common with each other artistically; Mekas was using film as a personal diary, Brakhage was creating a version of ‘poetic film’, Anger (despite using the kind of performers who might have found their way into a Warhol movie) was supposedly using film as a form of black magic. Jack Smith was far closer to Warhol, with his films that featured drag queens, movie monsters and also involved a kind of willed amateurishness.

To a greater or lesser extent, a lack of professionalism was forced on all underground film-makers, partly because they lacked large budgets, and also because they often lacked professional skills, but they all tried to make a virtue of it. They rejected the values of mainstream filmmaking, decrying it as glib, safe and crassly commercial. Once freed from the yoke of the mainstream, film-makers were able to pursue a more eccentric and individual vision, and one that frequendy included a sexual explicitness that mainstream cinema couldn’t hope to match. This latter was a strategy that brought them a far larger audience than they might otherwise have had.

Warhol was not in at the very beginning of the underground film movement, but he quickly became familiar with the genre and was soon by far the most famous, acclaimed, and indeed commercially successful member of this rather disunited group.

P. Adams Sitney seems to have been onto something when he writes in his book Visionary Film that;

“Warhol turned his genius for parody and reduction against the American avant-garde itself.”

Warhol’s movies do indeed seem to be simultaneously the genuine article yet also a send-up of the whole idea of experimental film. Certain strategies that other film-makers took very seriously become wry jokes in Warhol’s work.

However, the term parody suggests a level of sustained engagement that is far more studied than anything Warhol ever attempted. What he did bring to a frequently over-earnest and high-minded group was a coolness, a glamour — even if a frequently tawdry sort — and a deadpan sense of humour.

Between 1963 and 1968 Warhol made many hundreds of films, although in this context we might well ask exactly what constitutes a film, or at least a finished work. Certain ‘films’ consisted simply of unedited reels of footage, shown exactly as they had been returned from the lab. Others were amalgams, put together from largely unrelated footage. Films were cannibalized, reels were removed from apparently completed works and then made to stand alone or inserted into entirely different works.

One might also ask in what sense Warhol was the ‘maker’ of some of these films. Often his creative input consisted of little more than turning on the camera and then walking away. Be that as it may, the results are uniquely his. Anyone can turn on a camera, but turning on a camera doesn’t guarantee making a Warhol (or even a Warholesque) movie.

One reason for the high number of films is that a great many of them were three-minute ‘screen tests’. When Warhol first bought his movie camera, anyone entering the Factory was made to sit down and confront the camera while a roll of film passed through it. Later these short films were put into compilations such as 13 Most Beautiful Boys and 13 Most Beautiful Women (both 1964-65), and 50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities (1964-66). Subjects include Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson and Edie Segdwick.

These are some of Warhol’s most appealing and yet rigorous works, and it must be said that Gerard Malanga is generally credited as their co-creator. There is no soundtrack. The camera is fixed on a tripod, the subject is framed head and shoulders, the lighting is harsh, the image is grainy black and white. There is a beauty to these films but it is not of the comforting sort. They manage to be both casual yet formal.

These films look better and better as time goes by and they certainly reinforce Warhol’s claims as a great portraitist. Although neither camera nor subject are in the ordinary sense ‘doing’ anything, an act of revelation nevertheless frequently occurs. The camera’s steady gaze reveals the subject, forces the subject to reveal him or herself in a way that many more engaged forms of film-making might not.

The most appealing results come when the sitters remain still and blank. If they try to do too much, try too hard to put on a show, the camera manages to expose them. Baby Jane Holzer, for example, is a beautiful woman but on screen she always seems to be posing and pouting for the camera. She looks fake. This ability of the camera to see into and through people is at the very heart of what cinema is and what it can do.

The casts for Warhol’s movies were taken from his life. There is the notion that one might have just turned up at the Factory and found oneself in a Warhol film. This apparently happened to Joe Dalessandro who went on to have a reasonably successful career in the movies, and also to a young man called Joe Spencer the eponymous hero of Bike Boy, who never appeared in another movie ever again. Yet for all Warhol’s open-door policy there was clearly a rather rigorous selection process going on. Hustlers, pretty boys, socialites, members of the art world, drag queens and bikers were welcome, but just plain folks, uncool people, members of the ‘straight’ world, did not find themselves invited to appear in Warhol’s movies.

Certain of the early films might be considered as works of conceptual art: Sleep (1963) is a five-hour film of a man (John Giorno) sleeping; Eat (1964) shows a man taking over 30 minutes to eat a single mushroom; Kiss (1963), consists of footage of various couples kissing; and most spectacularly Empire (1964) is an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, from sunset to sunrise.

A mere description is enough to suggest how these films interrogate the nature of cinema, how they challenge notions of audience expectation and endurance, and yet they are not conceptual in the way that, say, Tony Conrad’s movie The Flicker (1965) is. This is a film that physically consists only of lengths of clear and black film, so that flashes of light appear on the screen interspersed with periods of complete darkness. Andy Warhol might have liked that idea, but it doesn’t sound like a Warhol movie. And even though one reel of Empire is more or less entirely black you feel that this is a campy joke at the expense of Warhol’s own technical failings as much as it is an attempt at deconstruction.

Warhol’s early films are given a soft, dreamlike, possibly drug-like, atmosphere by being deliberately shown in slow motion. They were filmed at 24 frames per second, the speed of sound film, then projected at 16 frames per second, the speed of silent film. Incidentally, today’s silent films are projected at 18 frames per second so we generally don’t see Warhol’s films in quite the way a contemporary audience did. Stan Brakhage is famously reported to have watched Empire at 24 frames per second and found it empty and unsatisfactory, but on watching it again at 16, he was able to declare it a masterpiece.

Warhol’s movies embody a private history of the cinema. After making a great many silent movies he discovered sound, although admittedly the soundtracks of some of his movies are more or less unintelligible. Next he discovered scripts, or at least scenarios, often by the poet and playwright Ronald Tavel. Often, in a very loose imitation of the Hollywood Studio system, these movies were also ‘vehicles’ for various Factory superstars: Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Gerard Malanga. They had titles such as Suicide, Horse, Vinyl, Hedy, More Milk Yvette, The Closet.

Stephen Koch, author of Stargazer, the definitive book on Warhol’s movies, and a vigorous though far from uncritical champion of the works, describes some of these early sound films as ‘bad to a degree that is barely credible’ (p.65).

Certainly in some of Warhol’s films it is difficult to separate avant-garde aesthetic strategies from simple indifference or incompetence. In his memoir POPism (p.240), Warhol tells of a falling out with Taylor Mead because Warhol shot a film featuring Mead, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac but in such a way that you couldn’t tell who was who. The reel was then lost altogether. Mead denounced Warhol for being irresponsible and inept, a charge that would seem pretty much undeniable, but Warhol apparently found such an accusation as absurd as it was irrelevant.

This celebration of willed ineptitude reaches a sort of zenith with Poor Little Rich Girl (1965) starring Edie Sedgwick. It is a two-reeler, the first 33-minute reel of which is entirely out of focus. Originally both reels were out of focus because of technical problems with the lens. Warhol reshot the film, an unheard-of occurrence in the Warhol universe, but then he decided to keep one reel from each version for the final movie.

It is not an easy film to watch, but then boredom and endurance are always aesthetic issues in Warhol’s films; right from the start he talked about making a 24-hour movie. Sometimes the endurance may be emotional as well as temporal.

Beauty #2 (1965) again features Edie Sedgwick, sitting on a bed wearing just a bra and briefs, and looking gorgeous. A good-looking young man is on the bed with her and he makes desultory attempts to kiss and fondle her. She, however, is distracted, since off-screen an unseen actor (Chuck Wein) subjects her to a series of vicious insults and taunts.

There is little sense of anything being scripted and Sedgwick looks as though she is being genuinely tormented. She tries to keep her cool but doesn’t quite manage it. There is something genuinely unpleasant, even sadistic, about events on screen, and certainly the audience is implicated. You ask yourself why Sedgwick doesn’t just get up and leave — after all this is ‘only’ a film. At the same time you may ask yourself why you don’t stop watching, and the simple answer is because Sedgwick is so watchable. She has a genuine screen presence that many Warhol superstars lacked, and although the movie doesn’t have anything resembling a narrative, there is a great deal of tension and you keep watching in a horrified, fascinated way to see what happens next.

The performers in Warhol films are often treated, and treat each other, very badly. There is often an undercurrent of hostility, which sometimes erupts into real physical violence. In this sense there is certainly something sadistic and voyeuristic in the films, and yet you also feel there is a kind of skewed humanism there. Warhol is interested in people and likes to watch them. He isn’t indifferent. He wants to see what they will do next, and as viewers we are made to share his voyeuristic urge.

Warhol experienced considerable commercial success with Chelsea Girls (1966). It is his most accessible film in several senses, and even though it was originally intended to be three-and-a-half hours long, projected onto twin screens with the projectionist selecting between soundtracks, it is often shown on a single screen, in an edited version that lasts about 90 minutes.

Although without narrative in the conventional sense, it does have a comprehensible if very loose structure. It consists of segments showing scenes from the lives of people who are ostensibly living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a long-notorious hang-out for artists, Bohemians and their hangers-on.

It is possible to read the film as a quasi-documentary about the inhabitants of Warhol’s world. The performers, if not exactly acting, are at least improvising for the camera, and sometimes the performances lurch into psychodrama, which can be threatening and disturbing. There is an improvised mother/son argument between Marie Menken and Gerard Malanga, footage of Eric Emerson talking his way through an LSD-trip while ‘psychedelic’ lights play over his naked body, and just occasionally there is something as benign as Nico trimming her fringe.

The most famous scene, generally known as the ‘Pope Ondine’ sequence, has the actor of that name hearing the improvised confession of an actress, Rona Page, who is clearly out of her depth, and the scene rapidly gets out of hand. Ondine’s performance is more intense, witty, skilful, in every way more engaging than that of his co-star. She isn’t his equal as a performer and when she calls him a ‘phony’ he is thrown into an unassuagable temper tantrum which involves throwing a drink, slapping the actress across the face and going into an intense rant about her phoniness.

It is an exquisitely unbearable scene to watch. The actress really does get hit, Ondine’s anger is real, and although one knows that all of this is being done largely for the benefit of the camera and the audience, one is nevertheless watching something very risky and authentic. There is something abusive and exploitative about the whole episode, and yet Ondine’s performance is brilliant and utterly compelling. There is nothing quite like it anywhere else in cinema.

Much nonsense has always been written about Warhol’s cinema. Peter Gidal writes of Lonesome Cowboys, a very camp and only intermittently funny western spoof;

“…he [Warhol] manages to use a common situation rather than an eccentric one: the game of being a cowboy on the range. He chooses the most crucified subject-matter and remakes it, returns it to its mythical archetypal importance, but now as an alternative, as a radical ideal, not as a worn-out history.”

This doesn’t seem entirely absurd until you actually watch the movie, at which point it becomes utterly irrelevant. It just seems to be an example of the critic proving he is cleverer than the artist.

The problem for critics is that Warhol’s art is endlessly subversive, and it certainly subverts much high-brow criticism. He refuses to take himself quite as seriously as his critics would like him to. Stephen Koch in Stargazer writes about a notorious food fight in The Loves of Ondine (1967-68) and says;

“One cannot decide whether to call it loathsome or merely hilarious.”

The movie tries to recapture the intensity of Ondine’s performance in Chelsea Girls, but here it seems rather forced. He exercises his camp, scabrous wit in a series of improvised encounters with the likes of Viva and Pepper Davis, but then ‘for no reason’ (according to Koch) the scene changes and we are watching some skimpily dressed Hispanic men throwing milk and flour at each other. They do this for a very, very long time.

Koch is outraged and insulted that this is ‘the featured segment of the film made by the most conspicuous cineast of the avant-garde immediately after his major public and artistic triumph’ (he is speaking about Chelsea Girls). And, of course, in one sense, Koch is absolutely ‘right’ to be outraged. The scene is indeed puerile and tedious, and very much not the kind of scene you would include in a movie if you wanted to be regarded as a serious avant-garde film-maker. But the fact that Warhol included it seems to give him the ultimate victory. If you are going to be truly subversive you obviously also have to subvert the notion of the serious avant-garde film-maker. This doesn’t, of course, make the food fight scene any more bearable to watch.

Warhol concluded his private history of the cinema by becoming a namebrand producer, rather than a hands-on director. His shooting by Solanas certainly played a major part in this, but one also feels that by 1968 he had probably done all he could with the form.

Later Warhol movies such as Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) were directed and largely conceived by Paul Morrissey. They tend to be rather sneered at these days but were well regarded at the time, and Warhol was happy enough to put his name to them. They seem to belong to the world of commerce rather than art, although there is certainly still nothing very slick or professional about them. They are populated by typical Warhol characters — hookers, junkies, transvestites — but they feel like movies about the Warhol milieu rather than being a product of it. Later there were a couple of horror movie parodies, one of Dracula and one of Frankenstein, which were just dreadful.

Whether Warhol’s movies have any lasting influence beyond the art world is debatable. They are essentially sui generis. They were of their time, there had never been anything like them before and there is never likely to be anything quite like them ever again.

Summary

Warhol was part of the American ‘underground film’ movement.

Warhol’s early films can be regarded as conceptual, later ones are more like documentaries about the world he moved in.

His work represents a personal history of the cinema.

By 1968 he seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of what he could do with film.