In his self-portraits he is at least as hard on himself as he is on others.
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 1960s American experimental filmmakers. The films were anti-Hollywood and anti-mainstream, and took much of their inspiration from the 1960s 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.