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.