ASPEN ART MUSEUM Warhol and Film
ANDY WARHOL: LIFETIMES
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intensity to the improvised narrative action that played out within the confined space of the film frame. Warhol also explored expanded cinema, including projected films alongside the music of The Velvet Underground. In Outer and Inner Space (1965), a two-screen projec- tion that included video, one of his stars, Edie Sedgwick, performed in a remarkably introspective self-portrait. Chelsea Girls (1966), one of Warhol’s best-known films, was an epic cinematic synthesis of separate improvised nar- ratives featuring Warhol’s stars playing off two screens. Warhol crossed over into popular cul- ture in part through his films and, later, his videotapes and television pro- ductions, while his writings, especially The Andy Warhol Diaries (first published posthumously in 1989), offer a brilliant look at New York cultural life. There is still much to be learned by connecting the different aspects of Warhol’s crea- tive process and output. In the early 1980s, Warhol decided his film works should be entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The film catalogue raisonné project at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, together with the film-pres- ervation efforts of MoMA, and the digi- tization of the films at the Andy Warhol
In an essay included in John Coplans’s anthology Andy Warhol (1970), the filmmaker Jonas Mekas quoted Andy Warhol as saying: ‘All my films are artificial, but then everything is sort of artificial. I don’t know where the artifi- cial stops and the real begins.’ Warhol created hundreds of films in the 1960s —a body of work that constitutes one of the great achievements of late 20th- century art. The films largely emanated from the silver-walled Factory, a con- verted loft on East 47th Street in New York that became a gathering place for musicians, artists, actors and dancers drawn to Warhol’s enigmatic aura and the world being created around him. Mekas also recalled Warhol observing that he liked to ‘leave the camera running until it runs out of film because that way I can catch people being themselves. It’s better to act naturally than to set up a scene and act like someone else. You get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to act like they’re themselves.’ Artifice was one of the aesthetic strategies at the heart of his groundbreaking filmmaking. The impact of cinema on all of the arts across the 20th century was trans- formative. The way time was edited and point of view was treated in cinema shaped the way the world was repre- sented in other media. Warhol’s partic- ular insight was to recognize that Hollywood, together with the material presence of a growing consumer cul- ture, were primary ingredients in the
expanding mythology of capitalism and celebrity. His film practice engaged with the emerging underground and alternative culture challenging that mythology. Warhol’s films became legendary —they were direct and confrontational, shaped by his intuitive understanding of the mechanics of film. He turned the codes of filmmaking inside out, pri- oritizing a direct, cutting-edge, perfor- mative engagement with narrative. The films’ running times, which ranged from a few minutes to many hours, ex- pressed Warhol’s expansive and flexible view of the medium. The apparatus of the camera and the mechanical means of reproduction fulfilled an aesthetic predicated on duplication and a conceptual engagement with creating intense scenarios for the camera. His earliest films—including Sleep , Kiss (both 1963), Blow Job and Empire (both 1964)—are a direct cinema of representation with no soundtrack. The films are projected not at the standard sound speed of 24 frames per second (fps), but at 16 fps, known as silent speed; this slowed down the action, giving the moving image a material presence that draws out subtle details and conveys an uncanny psychological power. Warhol also turned to impro- visatory narrative and performative strategies coming out of the under- ground music and theater scenes. In such films as Vinyl (1965), the charismatic performers brought added emotional
Below Andy Warhol, Sleep , 1963. Courtesy: The
Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
John G. Hanhardt curated ‘The Films of Andy Warhol’ (1988) and ‘Andy Warhol’s Video and Television’ (1991) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is general editor of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 1963–1965.
Museum, Pittsburgh, are providing a fuller understanding of Warhol’s re- markable body of films and their place in his central contribution to late 20th- century art. “Warhol created hundreds of films—a body of work that constitutes one of the great achievements of late 20th-century art.”
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