warhol in 10 takes [introduction with glyn davis] 2013

I N TRODUCT I ON 1

I N TRODUCT IONG l y n D a v i s a n d G a r y N e edh am

‘Does Andy Warhol make you cry?’

Louise Lawler’s work entitled ‘Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?’ appears in the collection of the Museumof Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It takes the form of a photograph shot in 1988 at an auction: one of theitems for sale was Warhol’s 1962 painting ‘Round Marilyn’. The auction house’s label describing the Warholwork (and estimating its value) can also be seen. Alongside the photograph, Lawler has positioned aPlexiglass label of her own, with the work’s title in gilded lettering. Perhaps a more appropriate question toask would have been: does Andy Warhol make anyone cry? Aside from the tears that might spring to theeyes at the astronomical prices some of Warhol’s paintings exchange hands for, the artist is perhaps betterknown for his affectless stance and supposedly unemotional oeuvre. His best-known works – the Brilloboxes and Campbell’s soup tins, screen prints of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, an 8-hour film of the Empire State Building – all have the detachment associated with Pop Art: famous popularcultural icons and objects repeated over and over again, emotionless, all surface, a mechanical reproductionwith no depth. And in interviews Warhol projected a public persona that expressed an affinity withmachines, giving the impression that he didn’t care, or that he had no meaningful opinions. Lawler’s image –a photograph of an artwork that was itself made using a publicity image of Monroe – highlights the layers ofdistance that can be built into any engagement with Warhol’s life and career. And yet still – that title implies– it is possible to be deeply affected by the artist’s work.

Andy Warhol has certainly made us cry a great deal during the editing and writing of this book, andduring the many hours we have spent watching his films. Tears of pleasure and laughter at particular moviesor scenes that have provided us with untrammelled joy, such as Andrew Meyer and John Palmer making outin Kiss (1963–4), or Brigid Berlin speeding in a bath of cold water in Tub Girls (1967). The tears of thearchival researcher unearthing extraordinary resources (handwritten letters by superstars, rare flyers andadverts for films and events, an invite to Warhol’s funeral) – some of which are reproduced in this volume.Tears of frustration at lost opportunities and historical gaps, such as the list of films we wanted to see butcouldn’t, or the interviews that scheduling conflicts prevented us from conducting. Tears of comradeshipthat come from the great pleasure of working with archivists, writers, collaborators and publishers who aresimilarly devoted to Warhol’s career and legacy.

Working with Warhol’s cinema as an academic can be a complex and daunting undertaking – enough,perhaps, to reduce some to tears. In 1972, Warhol removed his films from public circulation. It was only afterhis death in 1987 that this enormous body of material was unearthed, and the process of cataloguing,preserving and restoring began – a joint venture between the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMAin New York, with cooperation and support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.1 The scaleof this project was outlined by Callie Angell in 1994:

The Andy Warhol Film Collection constitutes an extraordinary assemblage of materials that in size andcomplexity seems to be unprecedented in the history of independent cinema. The collection comprisesmore than 4,000 reels of film, including original footage, print materials, outtakes, and unreleased works;Warhol’s original footage alone totals just over 290 hours of film …2

More recently, J. J. Murphy, in his book The Black Hole of the Camera, breaks the film-making down intoseven categories: early films; scenarios by Ronald Tavel; films made with Chuck Wein; sound portraits;expanded cinema; sexploitation films; Paul Morrissey films.6 Finally, Callie Angell outlines the followingnuanced groupings.7 To Angell’s divisions and subsets we have added three more categories: early ‘homemovies’ shot in the latter half of 1963; documentary evidence and filmed performances; and conceptualseries. We have also included a range of indicative films in each category, although any individual title couldarguably belong to more than one grouping. Our intention is to offer a valuable framework through which to view the remainder of this introduction as well as the essays collected in the book; for those unfamiliarwith Warhol’s cinema, in particular, we hope that it provides a useful breakdown of the richness and varietyof his films.

1. EARLY ‘HOME MOVIES’ AND ‘NEWSREELS’ FROM 1963Taylor and John,Wynn Gerry Claes, Bob Indiana Etc., Billy Klüver, John Washing, Naomi and John.

2. MINIMALIST FILMS Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), Shoulder (1964), Haircut (Nos.1–3) (1963–4), Blow Job (1964), Eat (1964),Isabel Wrist (1964).

3. EARLY EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVES AND ‘UNFINISHED FILMS’8

Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … (1963), Batman Dracula (1964), Soap Opera (1964), Sunsets (1967).

4. SCREEN TESTS AND PORTRAIT FILMS Henry in Bathroom (1963), Marisol – Stop Motion (1964), Screen Tests (1964–6), Mario Banana No. 1 andNo. 2 (1964), Rick (1966), Henry Geldzahler (1964), Bitch (1965), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), Face (1965),Paul Swan (1965), Mrs Warhol (1966), Bufferin (1966).

5. SCRIPTED SOUND FILMS MADE WITH RONALD TAVEL Harlot (1964), Vinyl (1965), Kitchen (1965), Horse (1965), The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), Space (1965),Screen Test #1 and #2 (1965), Hedy (1965), Withering Sights (1966), Suicide (1966) and two reels fromThe Chelsea Girls (1966).

6. THE EDIE SEDGWICK FILMSRestaurant (1965), Afternoon (1965), Beauty No. 1 and No. 2 (1965), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), Prison(1965), The Andy Warhol Story (1966).

7. EXPERIMENTS IN MULTI-SCREEN PROJECTION9

Lupe (1965), More Milk Yvette (1965), Outer and Inner Space (1965), The Chelsea Girls (1966), **** (1967).

8. CONCEPTUAL FILM SERIES Kiss (1963–4), Couch (1964), Six Months (1964), The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women (1964–5), TheThirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964–6), Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities (1964–6).

9. DOCUMENTARY/FILMED PERFORMANCES Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love (1963), Elvis at Ferus (1963), Jill and Freddy Dancing(1963), Duchamp Opening (1963), Dinner at Daley’s (1964), Jill Johnston Dancing (1964), John and Ivy(1965), The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966), Kiss the Boot (1966).

10. SEXPLOITATION FILMS Bike Boy, Nude Restaurant, Tub Girls, I, a Man, The Loves of Ondine (all 1967).

11. ON-LOCATION FILMS My Hustler (1965), Nude Restaurant (1967), Imitation of Christ (1967), San Diego Surf (1968), LonesomeCowboys (1968).

12. FILMS PRODUCED BY WARHOL AND DIRECTED BY PAUL MORRISSEYFlesh (1968), Trash (1970), L’Amour (1970), Women in Revolt (1971), Heat (1972), Flesh for Frankenstein(1973), Blood for Dracula (1974).

I N TRODUCT I ON 3

The process of preservation and cataloguing is necessarily a slow one, but has already reapedsignificant dividends. MoMA now makes available prints of a significant number of Warhol’s films for leaseand screening. Callie Angell’s magnificent catalogue raisonné of the Screen Tests series (1964–6) is notonly a beautiful object, but is also packed with an extraordinary amount of detail and insightful argument.There are, of course, many films yet to be preserved, including Suicide, Bitch, Prison (all 1966) and TubGirls. And others – such as the 8-hour edit of Imitation of Christ (1967) – may be lost to history entirely.

Despite the accomplishments of the Warhol restorers and preservers, there are challenges foracademics and teachers wanting to work with Warhol’s films (especially those outside the United States).Other than a small fraction of the Screen Tests, none of Warhol’s films are available legitimately on DVD,although most of Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-produced works – the trilogy of Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) andHeat (1972), Women in Revolt (1971), and the horror double bill of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Bloodfor Dracula (1974) – can be purchased. Illegal copies of some Warhol titles circulate, including a handful oftitles released by the Italian label RaroVideo, and some poor-quality dubs that exchange hands on sites suchas ebay. Actually sitting through his films, therefore, normally involves a visit to The Andy Warhol Museum inPittsburgh or to MoMA in New York, renting a print from MoMA’s library, or catching a title when it screensin an exhibition or in a cinema. In addition, the Warhol Museum holds Warhol’s own archive, among whose(seemingly infinite) boxes are invaluable materials relating to the production and exhibition of specific filmtitles. In working on their contributions for this book, all of our authors spent sustained time with Warholarchival materials and in dialogue with particular archivists.

In recent years, the volume of critical and academic work on Warhol’s cinema has expandedsignificantly. Journal issues and articles, monographs on individual films or more broadly on his film output asa whole, catalogue essays, along with chapters in books on particular theoretical topics, have all exploredaspects of Warhol’s film output. As Benjamin Buchloh recently commented, ‘contemporary scholarshipalmost exclusively addresses the filmic legacies of Andy Warhol, which emerge perhaps as an even greatercontribution to rethinking industrial culture and the culture industry than his paintings had always alreadysuggested’.3 We hope that this volume can contribute in meaningful ways to that body of contemporaryscholarship, in addition to providing readers with access to some of the archival materials that our authorshave unearthed during their research. In order to lay the groundwork for the ‘Ten Takes’ collected together in this book, however, this prologue introduces key aspects of Warhol’s enormous body of film work,addressing important concepts and topics that recur throughout critical considerations of that oeuvre.Despite the length of this introduction (which could perhaps be read as a self-reflexive commentary on someof Warhol’s experiments with endurance), it is important to note that we have not attempted to beexhaustive; there are significant omissions that are worthy of sustained study in their own right, such as thecycle of films featuring Edie Sedgwick, or the issue of stardom and performance in Warhol’s cinema.

An initial categorisation

How to begin tackling the extraordinary volume of Warhol’s film output? In what ways can we identifyconnections between particular titles, organise them into groupings, in order to facilitate analysis andcomprehension? A number of existing historical and critical accounts of Warhol’s cinema attempt acategorisation of his film output. These sometimes frame parts of the oeuvre through formal parameters (theScreen Tests series, 33-minute unedited reels, zooming and panning, and so on), employment of particularforms of technology and material (Bolex and Auricon cameras, sound, colour), exhibition practices (double-screen projection, theatrically exhibited sexploitation films) or collaborative groupings involving certain stars,playwrights and other notables (Ronald Tavel, Chuck Wein, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Paul Morrissey, etc.). In his 1989 book Allegories of Cinema, for example, David James suggests that Warhol’s film-making fallsinto four phases: the silent, unedited, 100-ft reels; the sound features, sometimes scripted and with cameramovement; the feature-length colour films; collaborations with Paul Morrissey.4 Similarly, Richard Dyer hasoutlined a periodisation of Warhol’s film output that breaks it into four distinct parts. As he writes,

One way of looking at these groupings of Warhol films is as an ironic, knowing recapitulation of the historyof the movies, a history at once technical-aesthetic and commercial. The first films are fascinated by theprocess of filming itself; gradually spectacle and performance become more important, and are thenorganised into increasingly coherent and planned narratives. Concurrently, the films reach beyond the fineart world, first to the sub-world of gays, prostitutes, addicts and so on, who stand in this history for thefairground and immigrant audiences of conventional histories, and finally achieve mass media success withstars and a studio set-up ironically named The Factory.5

2 WARHOL I N T E N TAK E S

One of Warhol’s contributions to cinema is that he forces us to reorganise not only our ways of seeing andhearing, but also how we categorise, list, historicise and document films as discrete entities in teleologicalformations. One question that has been posed and explored by a number of Warhol scholars and historiansis ‘what was Warhol’s first film?’ Within the field of film studies, an auteur’s first film is sometimes identifiedas that in which they ‘set out their stall’, establishing key thematic concerns and stylistic tropes that willecho throughout the remainder of their career. In relation to Warhol’s significant and diverse body of films,then, identifying his first movie might enable concrete statements to be made regarding Warhol’s intentions– at least initially – in moving into making films. However, if categorising Warhol’s movies is complicated, sois pinpointing his first film. In some accounts, it seems to be Sleep; in others, Tarzan and Jane Regained,Sort Of … Both titles were shot in 1963, the year that Warhol began making films, and also the year of theLiz and Elvis screen prints. Sleep and Tarzan and Jane couldn’t be more different from one another: theformer is a studied avant-garde experiment in repetition and duration, whereas the latter is more of a looselystructured underground Beat film. Neither film was screened in 1963: Sleep was first publicly exhibited from17 to 20 January in 1964; Tarzan and Jane was left unfinished by Warhol only to be completed by its starTaylor Mead, and received its premiere on 17 February 1964. Indeed, if screening for an audience is thecriterion used to identify Warhol’s ‘first film’, then it is individual reels from Kiss that can claim the title.

Should we allow Warhol himself to determine what his first film was? In an interview from 1965, Warholsays, ‘my first movie was called Taylor Mead in Hollywood’ and ‘next came my Sleep movie’.11 Even as lateas 1977 when the films were out of circulation, Warhol was still referring to Tarzan and Jane as his first film.12

Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … troubles attempts at a neat periodisation of Warhol’s cinema: itchallenges any assertions about his early films being silent, static, unedited and minimal in content. Warholdidn’t disavow Tarzan and Jane’s difference from those minimalist works and told one interviewer that ‘Tarzan,my first movie, is more like my later ones because it tells a story in several scenes.’13 The film’s cameraworkeschews the stationary camera of Sleep, it has both black-and-white and colour reels, and there is asoundtrack. Tarzan begins with a shot of a California motorway and a sign for Tarzana Reseda (located in theSan Fernando Valley) that Reva Wolf suggests captures the on-the-road sensibility and influence of Beatculture on the film.14 Casting Taylor Mead further established connections to Beat culture: Mead hadappeared in Ron Rice’s Beat film The Flower Thief (1960). While Beat references are also evident later inWarhol’s cinema in Couch (1964) through appearances by Ginsberg and Kerouac, Warhol did not pursue analignment between his film-making and the Beat tradition. David James offers an unfavourable account ofTarzan and Jane: he calls the film amateurish and touristic, ‘an extremely rudimentary work, much of ittechnically incompetent’, and compares it (again unfavourably) to Stan Brakhage’s earlier Flesh of theMorning (1956), also filmed in Los Angeles.15 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … does, however, tap intothe mystique of Hollywood and establishes Warhol’s ‘meditation on the historical meaning of Hollywood’ as atheme that would underpin a large number of the films produced at the Factory.16

Though Warhol may have named Tarzan and Jane as his first film, it wasn’t the first that he shot. Afterhe bought his first camera in the summer of 1963, Warhol spent time in Old Lyme, Connecticut, at his friendWynn Chamberlain’s rental property. During that period, Warhol filmed a number of short ‘home movies’ and‘newsreels’, eight 100-ft rolls to be precise,17 and at the same time filmed some of the footage of JohnGiorno sleeping (also in Connecticut), which means that Sleep is only one among a number of possiblefirsts along with the ‘early eight’. If we examine some chronological dates and facts, it might get us closer tomaking sense of Warhol’s beginnings as a film-maker. At the same time, assembling such a timelinehighlights a significant challenge in undertaking Warhol scholarship: historical accounts are often providedby unreliable narrators who regularly contradict one another. Consider the following:

END OF APRIL 1963 (MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND): According to Steve Watson’s account of the Factoryyears, Warhol borrowed a camera from Wynn Chamberlain and filmed the first version of Sleep at the endof April.18 This seems to be a factual error or may refer to some footage of John Giorno that was filmed but was probably recorded later. There is no evidence or proper source credited in Watson’s book tosuggest that Warhol started filming anything before June or July. This ‘fact’ is probably derived from someof the comments Giorno made in his memoir about meeting Warhol and a conversation about the idea forSleep that occurred during the Memorial Day weekend (on 26 April), rather than the actual filming of anySleep footage.19

JULY 1963: In July, Gerard Malanga and Henri Cartier-Bresson take Warhol to Peerless Camera to buy aBolex camera for $1,200: this fact is repeated in several biographical accounts and is widely taken to betrue.20 Victor Bockris dates to July the filming of the first (underexposed) footage of Sleep, whereasWatson’s account suggests that this is a second version of the film. Giorno remembers the filming of Sleep

I N TRODUCT I ON 5

This selection of films only represents a portion of Warhol’s film output and is in no way a definitive list ortaxonomy. There are many films that are difficult to place in any of our twelve categories. These wouldinclude Three (1964), the pornographic film with Ondine, the commissioned Bufferin Commercial (1966)and some of the ‘adaptations’ like Since (1966), which is based on the JFK assassination, or Donyale Luna(1967), based on Snow White. There is also a substantial number of 33-minute sound reels, some of whichseem to exist on their own, which have titles like Nancy Fish and Rodney, Susan Space, Courtroom andRichard and Mary (all 1966); and many others that were used to make up the 25 hours of **** (1967), suchas Katrina Dead and Alan and Apple. In addition, there are films shown in multiple or different versions,looped 3-minute extracts of longer films, compilations used for background projection, and many other titlesas yet only known to Warhol archivists which will be revealed by the second volume of the catalogueraisonné of films.

Beginnings, sort of

About two years ago, I just suddenly came up with the thought that making movies would be somethinginteresting to do, and I went out and bought a Bolex 16mm camera. I made my first movie in California, on atrip to Los Angeles. I went there with Taylor Mead, an underground movie star. We stayed in a differentplace every day. We took some shots in a men’s room out at North Beach and we used the old Hollywoodmansions for some of the inside shots. The movie we were shooting was Tarzan and Jane Regained …Sort Of. Taylor Mead called it his most anti-Hollywood film.10

4 WARHOL I N T E N TAK E S

took place sometime in August.21 Callie Angell also marks July as Warhol’s ‘decision to enter filmmaking’.22

Warhol himself suggested that he bought the camera in the spirit of going to Hollywood, when he travelledto attend his second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.23

SUMMER 1963: Warhol films Jack Smith at Wynn Chamberlain’s in Connecticut. It is during thesenumerous visits that Warhol filmed several home movies and newsreels, including Andy Warhol Films JackSmith Filming Normal Love. In POPism he writes, ‘the second thing I ever shot with a 16mm camera was alittle newsreel of the people out there filming for Jack’.24 David Bourdon credits Andy Warhol Films JackSmith Filming Normal Love as ‘one of the first things he filmed’.25 In Bourdon’s chronology, the filming ofSleep comes after the time spent at Wynn Chamberlain’s, but Bourdon might mistakenly mean the editingof Sleep. The ‘home movie’ group of eight 100-ft rolls appear to be portraits of the people in them (WynnGerry Claes, Taylor and John, Bob Indiana Etc.) and are from late summer/early autumn.26

AUGUST 1963: As J. Hoberman writes, the reels of Kiss (originally referred to as Andy Warhol’s Serial)were publicly screened on a weekly basis throughout the autumn of 1963; this is also supported by JonasMekas, who recalls that Warhol brought some of the Kiss reels to the Gramercy Arts Theater during thisperiod.27 Some of the Kiss reels were filmed before Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …

SEPTEMBER 1963: After seeing some footage, Jonas Mekas mentions Sleep in his Village Voice ‘MovieJournal’ column.28 On 30 September, Warhol is present at the opening of the Ferus Gallery show in LosAngeles. In the same month, he also attends the performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893–5),considered to be an influence on Sleep as a concept. Both David Bourdon and Jonas Mekas state thatWarhol filmed Freddy Herko roller-skating in September 1963.29 The film is known as either Rollerskate orDance Movie.

OCTOBER 1963: Around the end of September/beginning of October, Warhol films Tarzan and JaneRegained, Sort Of … at various locations around Los Angeles. Despite Warhol’s claims that it was his firstfilm, chronologically it comes after all of the other films mentioned above.

17–20 JANUARY 1964: Sleep (1963) is publicly exhibited at the Gramercy Arts Theater as ‘Andy Warhol’sEight Hour Sleep Movie’. It is presented as a benefit for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative ‘Starting at 8pm’.30

These are the ‘infamous’ screenings in which few people were in attendance and a radio was used to lendatmosphere.31 The film’s projectionist was allegedly the underground film-maker Ken Jacobs.

17 FEBRUARY 1964: The date of the premiere of Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … at the NewBowery Theater following post-production by Taylor Mead. It is advertised under the title Tarzan (& JaneRegained) ‘directed by Andy Warhol, sort of’.32 Mead assembled the footage and added his ownsoundtrack. This was planned at the time of filming, according to an interview both Warhol and Mead gaveto a Hollywood radio station in the autumn of 1963 when the film had the shorter title Tarzan Sort Of.33

The phrase ‘sort of’ was an expression used repeatedly in Mead’s poetry.34

I N TRODUCT I ON 76 WARHOL I N T E N TAK E S

Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of … (1963). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 80 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh,PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

From this chronology of events, it is clear that there are competing definitions of what constitutes the firstWarhol film. The disparate accounts and facts, impossible to reconcile completely, present a particularchallenge to film scholars and historians: is it possible to operate outside the boundaries of an ordinary,conventional understanding of film and film-making as something linear and chronological, led by productionrather than exhibition – and without adopting a director or artist’s own position on their work? In Warhol’scase, such standard approaches have to be questioned, if not entirely jettisoned, if we are to engage fullywith the uniqueness and complexity of his career as a film-maker.

Silence, stasis and structuralism: Warhol’s ‘art movies’

In 1963 and 1964, Warhol made a number of silent films with simple titles, minimalist content and oftenprotracted running times. A man is filmed sleeping: the resulting movie lasts for over five hours. Coupleskiss, one pairing per reel: each shot is held for several minutes, enabling the viewer an unusual degree ofaccess and proximity to the messy physicality. A curator sits in front of the lens for a film portrait, and growsincreasingly uncomfortable and bored as two lengthy reels of film stock pass through the camera. Perhapsmost notoriously, a static perspective on the Empire State Building records the fading of daylight, thebuilding being illuminated and time passing: when screened, the film lasts for 8 hours. Although they wererecorded at 24 frames per second (fps), Warhol insisted that this group of films be projected at the slowerspeed of 16fps; this has the effect of extending their exhibition length, and endows them with a marked andrather dream-like temporality. The physical and conceptual challenges posed by these works (is it possibleto sit through this? what benefits and pleasures are there in enduring the viewing?), as well as their sheeraudacity, ensured that they quickly attained widespread recognition. As Stephen Koch writes,

When the silents were made, they were accompanied by a brush fire of word-of-mouth report, throughoutNew York. But that word-of-mouth was sufficient unto itself. They seemed plainly films to be talked about.True, since people were talking about them, they must, for some obscure reason, have some obscure value.But it was very obscure. Nobody had to go.35

Even though Warhol removed his films from circulation for over fifteen years, the conceptual simplicity ofthese early works ensured that discussion about them continued. As Callie Angell noted of Empire (1964), for instance, despite a lack of screenings, the film ‘has thrived on a purely conceptual level since its creation,even occasionally growing in reputed length to twelve and even twenty-four hours’.36 This status prompts asignificant question: is it even necessary to see these films in order to be able to talk about them?

The answer, of course, is yes, if what is desired is engagement with the films in any meaningful waybeyond the basic pitch. As David Bourdon writes, ‘anyone who has actually sat through the films knowshow words fail to convey the experience’.37 The fact that the concept behind a film is simple, its contentminimal, does not mean that nothing happens during the running time. The smallest incident can take onextraordinary significance. The absence or removal of standard narrative cinematic devices – character, plot,story arc, action, dialogue, musical score, continuity editing, resolution – enables the spectator to questiontheir reliance on these factors for pleasure and satisfaction. The viewer may move between awareness ofthe film’s depicted ‘content’, of the presence (or otherwise) of the film-maker, and of the materiality of thefilm stock itself. Watching a film as an exercise in endurance can also provide the audience member with anenhanced recognition of their body’s location in the screening venue. Pamela Lee’s description of watchingEmpire identifies this physical challenge, and is worth quoting at length:

the movie’s seeming lack of incident, or better put, its demands upon our patience to distil those incidents,is what makes the work so ‘engaging’. Those fabled reports of audience members coming and going overthe course of the movie suggest that what is taking place off screen is as fundamental to the work as whatis being projected on screen. Empire thus stands as an allegory for time located elsewhere … At the sametime, the experience of the film also rests – discomfortingly, fitfully – within the body watching the film inthe present. Shifting from side to side, at first quietly and then with increasing impatience, we experienceour body as a duration machine. The bones poke through, head lolls on the stem of its neck. With eachmoment that passes, the eyes play tricks while the mind wanders: we see things that aren’t there orperhaps discount what is there. Self-consciousness descends over the audience at first, but that self-consciousness quickly dissipates and the body registers anticipation’s disappointment. The erect carriage ofthe committed cineaste gives way to the slouch and sprawl of the tired, the jaded, or the bored. And it’s atthis point that one relaxes into the deeply social experience of the movie …38


Empire (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 8 hrs 5 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum ofCarnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

The apocryphal reputation of Warhol’s cinema often relates to the films’ duration: he is the director who made‘that unwatchably long film about the Empire State Building’, a key player in the history of what we might call‘marathon cinema’. There is a truth in this reputation, however: the experience of duration is central to sittingthrough many of Warhol’s films, even those which have shorter running times. Did Warhol ever intend Sleepor Empire (or, later, the 25 hours of ****) to be endured as a whole, consumed like regular narrative cinema?The descriptions of sitting all the way through Empire by writers including Douglas Crimp, Pamela Lee and J. J. Murphy seem to frame the experience as a rite: an endurance test, a challenge, a quasi-spiritualopportunity to spend a significant block of time communing with a rarely screened piece of work. But perhapsWarhol’s lengthy experiments have less in common with Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985, 9 hours) orSátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr, 1994, 7 hours), which are clearly structured and designed to be consumed aswhole works, than with such gallery installations as Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) or ChristianMarclay’s The Clock (2010, 24 hours). Both of these pieces, like Warhol’s durational works, compel theiraudiences to question their own relationships to time, narrative form and the moving image; however, they are not necessarily supposed to be seen in full (though 24-hour screenings of The Clock have taken place).

Pamela Lee situates examples of Warhol’s film output in relation to other artists working in the 1960s,highlighting the ways in which the exploration of time was a key thematic for a significant number ofpractitioners during the decade. Warhol, indeed, referred to his early, silent films as his ‘art movies’.43

Koch expands on this framing:

Speaking very roughly, Warhol’s early films belong in the stream of nonnarrative, ‘poetic’ avant-garde cinema,a very vital branch of modernism linked historically to Duchamp, Cocteau, and Buñuel, and that transplant ofmodernist thinking to the American sensibility that has been most conspicuous here in painting.44

I N TRODUCT I ON 11

Callie Angell also attempts to describe the same film’s effects:

By presenting an unmoving image of a motionless building in slow motion, Warhol simultaneously alters ourperception of time and monumentalises the ephemeral nature of film itself; passing light flares, watermarks, and other transient phenomena of the medium occur as spectacularly as sunrises and meteorshowers in the minimal scenery of Warhol’s film.39

As these quotes reveal, the central concern of Warhol’s silent films is the exploration of time. WatchingHenry Geldzahler (1964), a 99-minute portrait film made immediately after Empire using two spare reels leftover from the longer recording project, can invite sustained reflection on the passing of time. How often dowe sit still and keep our gaze fixed on another person for any considerable length of time (even lovers,partners)? Given that this film’s running time is similar to that of much conventional narrative cinema, howdoes the absence of structure, event and resolution affect our relationship to those 99 minutes? If thecamera was trained on you for a similar portrait, would you be able to sit still? Is a silent portrait more or lessrevealing than one in which the subject talks, but is similarly frustrated or exhausted by the presence of thecamera, such as Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967, also 99 minutes)? The lack of editing – the only‘cut’ in Henry Geldzahler occurs when the first reel runs out and is exchanged for the second halfwaythrough – exacerbates these effects: the unexpurgated stare remains locked, perhaps provoking discomfortin the spectator and a desire to look away. Gregory Battcock has drawn attention to the lack of‘conventional’ continuity editing in Empire, and the impact this has on the spectator’s experience of timewhile watching the film:

In commercial films events are rarely presented in their full time span. Time is distorted in such films –usually by compression. The time in Empire is distorted in a different way. It is distorted, perhaps, simply byits not being distorted when one would reasonably expect it to be. In addition, the action in the first reel isclearly speeded up, possibly so that the change from day to night, the major ‘event’ in the film, could besummarily disposed of in order to clear the way for the timeless ‘real’ time of the unchanging image of thebuilding.40

Except, of course, that this is not ‘real’ time, given that the film is projected at a speed slower than that atwhich it was recorded. Stephen Koch describes this projection practice as producing ‘a ritardando exertedover all movement and an effect that is extraordinarily alluring. … It is a technique that faintly dislocates thepressure of real time, extends it, and makes it slightly Other, in a lush, subtle experience of movement andtime possible only in film.’41

The use of this slower projection speed complicates any reading of Warhol’s silent films as simpledocumentary records of their chosen objects or topics. (In Eat and Sleep, this classification is muddled furtherby the looping of individual short reels of footage.) However, it is worth registering that, during their recording,Warhol’s silent films did capture periods of time that matched ‘real’ chronological time to that of the movementof the film stock through the Bolex or Auricon camera, thus capturing for posterity particular faces and iconsdeemed worthy. Thus, for instance, we have a record of darkness falling on the Empire State Building duringone night in 1964. This ‘documentary’ aspect of Warhol’s silent films is perhaps most evident in his largestexperiment with serial cinema: the 472 Screen Tests that were recorded between 1964 and 1966. Inretrospect, this extraordinary project presents a complex sense of the diverse mix of personalities passingthrough Warhol’s studio (musicians, critics, artists, an array of pretty boys and girls, and so on). It also servesas extensive documentary evidence of the historical and cultural significance, and liveliness, of Warhol’s milieuduring those years. And yet the slowed-down projection speed of these short reels – as with the other silentworks – provides an additional layer of aesthetic intrigue, and distances the viewer from the filmed material.

The ‘ritardando’ of slow projection is not Warhol’s only time-altering device; he also played withduration, perhaps most provocatively in Sleep and Empire. In 1967, Warhol would produce another 8-hourfilm, Imitation of Christ, and the 25-hour **** (Four Stars) comprised of the multi-screen projection of a largenumber of 33-minute reels, which was only ever screened once. As Callie Angell notes,

Warhol repeatedly came up with ideas for nearly interminable movies throughout his film-making years:these unrealised and possibly not entirely serious projects included a twenty-four-hour movie of a day in thelife of Edie Sedgwick; a twenty-four-hour film of Marcel Duchamp; a thirty-day-long film called the WarholBible, in which each page of the Bible would be projected on screen long enough to be read by theaudience; and a six-month-long film called Building, which would show ‘the destruction of an old building,the erection of a new’.42

1 0 WARHOL I N T E N TAK E S

Henry Geldzahler (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 99 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, amuseum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Warhol broke the most severe theoretical taboo when he made films that challenged the viewer’s ability toendure emptiness or sameness. … The great challenge, then, of the structural film became how toorchestrate duration; how to permit the wandering attention that triggered ontological awareness whilewatching Warhol films and at the same time guide that awareness to a goal.50

Stephen Heath, in his discussion of ‘structural/materialist film’, highlights the significance in the filmmovement of ‘an attention to temporality’, duration, loops and repetition, ‘the eviction of narrative’ and ‘thereduction as far as possible of given signifieds’.51 Heath mentions Couch and its employment of ‘shallowtime’,52 discussing its relationship to works by Michael Snow and Malcolm Le Grice. This particular body ofexperimental films serves as a productive reference point in understanding Warhol’s cinema. Although hewould swiftly move on to film works that employed scripts, dramatic situations and narrative that toyed withgenre and foregrounded performance, Warhol’s interests in duration, repetition and the experience oftemporality more broadly arguably influenced the remainder of his film career. Two films that were shownregularly throughout 1965, for instance, Vinyl and Poor Little Rich Girl, were knowingly advertised as ‘Andy Warhol “Shorties” – Only about 70 minutes each!’53

Warhol and underground cinema

As we have seen, Warhol’s cinema can be productively discussed in relation to painting and structuralistfilm; the Pop Art and Minimalism movements also serve as valuable contexts. One of the first critical andconceptual framings for his films, however, was an alignment made between Warhol and undergroundcinema in which they became almost synonymous with one another – much to the chagrin of someunderground and independent film-makers. Although Warhol entered the scene quite late, he nonethelessestablished and cemented in the mainstream consciousness a particular definition of underground cinema.This was forged through newspaper and magazine reports (such as the Daily News account from the set ofBeauty No. 2 [1965]) and the eventual overground success of The Chelsea Girls (1966) – a success whichwas also covered by the press.54 Three years before The Chelsea Girls signalled one possible end tounderground cinema, Jonas Mekas tirelessly championed Warhol’s films in the pages of his own FilmCulture magazine and occasionally in his Village Voice ‘Movie Journal’ column. Mekas chronicled the firstyears of Warhol’s film career, a period that would culminate in Warhol receiving the Sixth Independent FilmAward in 1964 for Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire.

This degree of attention was not without controversy and dissent. A befuddled press couldn’tunderstand the ‘badly exposed shots, pimply faces with no make-up, very odd faces with too much make-up, amateur actors, no actors, shots held for unchanging hours’,55 and Warhol and Mekas had plenty ofopponents among their peers. Programmer and critic Amos Vogel was particularly vehement. Vogel hadbeen a major protagonist in supporting independent American film in the 1950s with his Cinema 16 filmsociety that ran from 1949 to 1963. However, he did not include any of Warhol’s films in the IndependentCinema strand of the New York Film Festival in 1966. Vogel launched a late attack on the development ofunderground cinema in Evergreen Review in 1967 where he decried the non-discriminating selectionprocess, and claimed that the formlessness and improvised nature of many underground films was simplyjust bad film-making.56 Vogel berated those who refused to admit that underground films could be ‘bad’ (adig at Mekas and his inclusive screening policies), and his list of ‘thirteen confusions’ seemed like a barelyveiled attack on Warhol, culminating in his final suggestion that publicity shouldn’t be confused withachievement.57 The underground film-maker Gregory Markopoulos, who had been making films since the1940s, was also critical: he said of Warhol, ‘he just shoots nothing and he’s the biggest thing going’.58

One of the most amusing rants came from another film-maker, Emanuel Goldman, who sent a letter ofcomplaint to the Village Voice in which he wrote, ‘I have tolerated praise of his films shot without cameras,films shot without lenses, films shot without film, films shot out of focus, films focussing on Taylor Mead’sass for two hours etc.’59 Taylor Mead wrote back a month later in the Village Voice proclaiming that theycould not find any film in the archive of his ass. Warhol then went on to make the 76-minute film TaylorMead’s Ass (1964) in which the actor magically seems to stuff a number of objects up his behind, includingmoney, books and a copy of Time magazine.60

Underground cinema was a term that loosely organised both low-budget independent and experimentalfilms in the 1950s and 60s and overlaps with the concept of the New American Cinema, which unifiedexperimental, avant-garde and low-budget American film-making. Warhol’s film-making conforms to some ofthe definitions of underground cinema and the New American Cinema, which make explicit a break with theavant-garde traditions influenced by pre-war European cinemas. In 1961, in the pages of Film Culture, agroup of film-makers, producers and distributors issued a manifesto as the New American Cinema Group in

I N TRODUCT I ON 13

Certainly, this group of Warhol’s films can be usefully framed in relation to non-cinematic forms of artisticpractice. The lack of movement in long stretches of Sleep and Empire can result in the projected films resembling paintings or still photographs. Gregory Battcock suggests that the Empire State Building is ‘a big nothing’ as an architectural object, and that the main purpose of Warhol’s film is an exercise indemonstrating gradation, ‘the full range of tones from black to white’.45 Brigitte Weingart, in an essay on the Screen Tests, highlights the connection between sitting still in front of Warhol’s camera and the (not yetentirely lost) experience of sitting for a portrait painting.46 J. J. Murphy suggests that Empire ‘shares anaffinity with Vija Celmins’s series of paintings, drawings, and prints of starry night skies, which derive from a photographic source’.47 Indeed, as the grain of the film stock changes while the object depicted remainsmotionless, in Empire and other early titles, Warhol’s serial screen prints may be called to mind: the subtlyshifting patterns of paint dancing over the repeated faces of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy, or of images of death and destruction, similarly offer tonal variation to root images whose contours remainresolutely static.

In terms of their connection to other examples of avant-garde cinema, Warhol’s silent films are oftendiscussed in relation to structuralist film. A definition of this body of film practice is provided by P. AdamsSitney in his book Visionary Film:

The structural film insists on its shape and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’sperspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen. Very seldom will one find allfour characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements.48

For Sitney, Warhol was the ‘major precursor’ of the structural film; three of the four main characteristics maybe identified in the artist’s early movies, with only the flicker effect absent.49 Sitney compares Warhol’sexperiments with duration to Stan Brakhage’s 4-hour The Art of Vision (1965) and Ken Jacobs’s 6-hour Star Spangled to Death (1957–60/2003). As he writes,


which they outlined their politics.61 The manifesto privileged cinema as a personal artistic expression(although it must be noted that Warhol worked collaboratively, a topic which we will explore in detail shortly),rejected censorship, regulation and control, and called for alternative funding structures. Underground filmsand the underground film scene were viewed as an alternative to Hollywood not just in terms of technical andaesthetic considerations but, importantly, as new avenues and structures of distribution and exhibition.According to Gregory Battcock, film critic and occasional Warhol film star, the underground films were‘personal and idiosyncratic’, and the creation of a single artist who did not represent the established filmculture of Hollywood.62 The ‘Old American Cinema’ was ‘glutted and cluttered with expensive sets, actorsand union members with all the respect for material power’.63 Both underground cinema and the NewAmerican Cinema were steeped in an anti-Hollywood and anti-capital discourse, which makes Warhol’srelationship to underground cinema all the more complex. Warhol would eventually fashion his film-makingendeavours as an ersatz Hollywood studio with occasional scripts, parodies of genre and a stable of stars –while at the same time maintaining the underground ethos. Typical of a range of avant-garde artisticcommunities in early 1960s New York, Warhol’s films and their milieu conform to Sally Banes’s notion of thescene being caught in a ‘self-contradictory marriage between vanguard and popular culture’: in Warhol’scase, like that of Jack Smith, a contradictory relationship in which his experimental film language is perverselybeset with an adoration for classical Hollywood glamour and stardom.64 Hollywood was not the bad object inWarhol and Smith; rather it was ‘the background and material for the art of the New American Cinema’.65

Before his film-making began in the summer of 1963, Warhol had regularly attended screenings ofunderground films; he writes in POPism that he became interested in film-making because of the Beat filmPull My Daisy (dir. Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie, 1959). He knew many of the members and associates of theunderground and avant-garde film scene, and he later cast for the main role in The Life of Juanita Castro(1965) the artist and film-maker Marie Menken, who was also the partner of experimental film-maker WillardMaas of the Gryphon Group (Maas was apparently the off-screen fellator in Warhol’s Blow Job).66 There istender colour footage of Warhol and Menken having a rooftop Bolex sparring match in Martina Kudlácek’sdocumentary Notes on Marie Menken (2006). Naomi Levine, one of the kissers in Kiss and Jane in Tarzanand Jane Regained, Sort Of …, was a film-maker in her own right too, and Warhol observed Jack Smithfilming Normal Love out at Connecticut.67 He had also been attending the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in1963 at both the Bleecker Street Cinema and Gramercy Arts Theater with John Giorno on a weekly basisbefore Mekas was able to put a name to the face. Warhol would thus have seen many importantunderground films in the first half of the year, such as Little Stabs of Happiness (Ken Jacobs, 1963) and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (Ron Rice, 1963), both featuring Jack Smith, before beginninghis own film-making career and exhibiting the Kiss reels at the Coop.68

Jack Smith, a central figure in any history of underground cinema, was a major influence on Warhol’searly film-making, and greatly admired by him. Smith had already made Flaming Creatures (1963); Warholattended a private screening of the film held by Mekas, and its appeal may have resided in its flagrantlyqueer spirit and quasi-obscene imagery. Members of Smith’s entourage would migrate to the Factory in thespirit of forging or maintaining an artistic community: among them were Billy Name, Naomi Levine, FrancisFrancine and Mario Montez. The great underground, unreleased and unfinished Warhol film from 1964 wasDracula, the collaboration with Jack Smith that is most often documented under the title Batman Dracula.The Dracula film seems to have been known under a few titles including Silver Dracula, A Rose Gardenwithout Thorns and A Lavender Filter Throughout. One particular reel is called Dracula’s Workshop,69

while another is entitled Batman Dracula: Jack Smith and Beverley Grant.70 Batman Dracula also highlightssome of the complexities related to the undertaking of Warhol film scholarship in that, like other Warholtitles, it defies conventional understandings regarding how we define film as an object. There are multiplereels of Batman Dracula that amount to several hours of footage; there are two assembled versions of thefilm, one of which lasts around 79 minutes and contains two Screen Tests spliced in the original footage.Out of the several hours of footage that were filmed, who assembled the two versions and for what purposeremains unknown, although they probably date to sometime between 1967 and 1968.71

The 79-minute edit of Batman Dracula is worth briefly discussing. A good deal of the footage is close instyle to Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man. Banes’sdescription of Flaming Creatures as ‘dancing, posing, cross-dressing, sexual orgies, and campy vampirism’could also describe Batman Dracula.72 This film, then, though ‘unfinished’, has clear affiliations with canonicalunderground movies. It begins in a garden where Gerard Malanga cavorts around in a bikini before being bittenon the neck by Jack Smith’s Dracula. This sequence sets the tone of the movie with a number of cameraeffects and differing camera angles, including movements that bring the image in and out of focus. The sceneis campy, busy and rich in mise-en-scène detail. We are treated to the first of many Jack Smith-type shots: aclose-up of a hand bejewelled with rings. The scene then cuts to the two Screen Tests of Sally Kirkland and Ivy


suggest that one of Warhol’s main contributions to the field of art generally was a reassessment of themeaning of authorship. In their subject matter and their erasure of the signs of painterly expression, his firstpaintings threw into question what exactly made Warhol an artist, and by extension what made Warhol anauthor of his own work when it was so similar to, for example, the Coca-Cola bottle, the original printadvertisement, and so on. The critical apparatus has moved beyond these initial doubts expressed at theinception of Warhol’s artistic career, and the consensus regarding his contribution is now considered asnothing short of a major paradigm shift in the way that we ‘see’ art: Warhol changed the way we look at artand what in fact constitutes the object and subject of art. In regards to his film-making, it is also widelybelieved that Warhol fundamentally changed the ways that we think of film as a medium, but also how wemight think about key concepts (for example, stardom and performance) that are used to construct themeaning and sense of a film. In relation to film authorship, Warhol moves beyond the conventional romanticaccounts of the film director as creative individual, as well as the poetic conception of the lone experimentalfilm-maker à la Stan Brakhage. Here, it is worth noting that Callie Angell, speaking to Amy Taubin in theVillage Voice, had this to say:

We’ve found evidence that Warhol worked very hard at his filmmaking, that he experimented with variouslighting set-ups, and that for the most part he operated the camera himself. In the films that werecollaboratively made, I can tell when Warhol is behind the camera.76

The confidence with which Angell speaks about Warhol as a film-maker highlights the kind and degree ofauthorial control that he had over his movies. This control was demonstrated passively, but in that passivitywas located a forceful effect, in that the more Warhol abjured responsibility in what he did, including thepaintings, the more stressed the authorship-function was. Jonas Mekas was also perceptive in hisunderstanding of Warhol’s authorship as not being conventionally rooted in the singular role of ‘film director’but rather expressed through a process of realisation and the carrying out of practice that involved differentlevels of input and collaboration. As Mekas says:

The mystery of it all remains how it all holds together. It’s like the United States – the idea, the concept, the essentials (‘the Revolution’) come from Warhol, and the particulars, the materials, the people come from everywhere and they are held together by the central spirit, Andy Warhol – Andy Warhol who hasbecome almost the symbol of the non-committal, of laissez-faire, of coolness, of passivity – almost theNothingness Himself.77

The idea of Warholian authorship presented here is very much in keeping with Michel Foucault’s argumentthat authorship is a function used to organise meaning.78 Regardless of how quantified Warhol’s hands-onapproach to film-making was, this does not provide a meaningful definition of his authorship; rather, it is howhe ‘functioned’ to gel together and create tangible meaning through the production, circulation andinterpretation of his films. There are three tangible and meaning-making concepts that have been central tountangling and defining the Warhol ‘authorship-function’: collaboration, disavowal and conflict. These‘discursive formations’ of authorship are worth exploring in detail alongside particular examples of films.

Authorship as collaboration

Underground film production overlapped with and existed in relation to different artistic, social and culturalspheres encompassing art, fashion, dance, poetry, drugs, theatre, gossip and music. Despite the emphasisin underground cinema on personal expression and the author as film poet, many of the films, and not justWarhol’s, emerged through the contact and cooperation between different people and their associatedcreative and cultural worlds. In her analysis of Malanga and Warhol’s collaborative publication ScreenTests/A Diary, Reva Wolf refers to collaboration as a form of social exchange involving ‘statements of socialaffiliation’.79 She goes on to say that ‘collaboration ought to be regarded as a series of social interactions, in which public and professional affairs tend to be inseparable from personal and sexual relationships’.80

One reason behind many forms of creative collaboration is fiscal necessity: across the last century, artistshave often helped one another out because they have little or no money. The collaborative process was anintegral spirit of the 1960s art scene in particular, with New York being one of the major centres of creativeproduction; Sally Banes, in her study of the avant-garde scene, pinpoints this even more specifically toGreenwich Village.81 Rainer Crone, the first art critic to produce a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s work in1970,82 tells Victor Bockris:

I N TRODUCT I ON 17

Nicholson that run consecutively. (Why are the Screen Tests here? To hazard a guess, they could have beenincluded as an Exploding Plastic Inevitable [EPI] version of Dracula. We will discuss the EPI in more detailshortly.73) Following the two Screen Tests, the film moves to a new location on the rooftops of Manhattanwhere Dracula and Tally Brown dance in a theatrical and over-the-top manner, and the camera zooms in tosomeone in a striped jacket and fedora hat atop a chimney; the camera remains fairly static for this reel. The rest of the film takes place inside the Factory; the protagonists are now seated on the infamous red couchand Dracula is wearing a brocade cape. Lots of dancing ensues. There is a low, static camera angle near theFactory’s mirror ball and shots of feet and legs. Then a reel change cuts to Taylor Mead and Tally Brown seatedon the couch with a dog. One scene frames Jane Holzer having her hair and make-up done on the right-handside of the frame, while on the left a theatricalised S&M sequence takes place; the contrast between femaleglamour and gay male sexuality that divides the activities is also evident in Vinyl a year later.74 Gerard Malangawhips someone sprawled over the Factory’s silver-painted motorbike. The camera zooms in and out to eachlashing of the whip, and does a 360-degree pan taking in the entire Factory. Meanwhile, Dracula floats about inthe background overseeing the action. Someone is suffocated by silver foil, Dracula stares into a mirror whilethe camera zooms in and out, Jane Holzer sits on the motorbike, Dracula is filmed through a cellophane filter inan ‘upside-down shot’, naked men dance around. In short, Dracula is a busy, crowded film with a rich mise enscène that uses a host of different filming devices and techniques; it also has one of the largest casts of anyWarhol film.75 Further, like Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …, Batman Dracula is another example thatchallenges the identification of Warhol’s early cinema with stasis and minimalism.

Warhol and authorship

While a good deal of Batman Dracula has the visual register of a Jack Smith film, it would be naïve tosuggest that the film is anything other than Warhol’s. The status, application and concept of authorship is aconstant presence and concern across the entirety of his career. Indeed, it wouldn’t be too bold a claim to


Batman Dracula (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, unfinished. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum ofCarnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Authorship as disavowal

If you want to talk about Andy’s art, talk to Brigid. She does it all anyway.91

One of the enduring myths of Warhol’s film-making is that he just turned on the camera and walked away. Whilethis did happen on numerous occasions – for example, with Henry Geldzahler and some of the Screen Tests – ithas become an exaggerated anecdote used to imply that Warhol did nothing or quite simply didn’t direct. Thesecriticisms emerge from the assumption that ‘directing’ is akin to some kind of attentive camera operation. Rather,allowing the subject to remain in front of the camera in the absence of the film-maker might enable a differentperformance to emerge: some of Warhol’s sitters recount this as an uncomfortable and unnerving experience.One of Warhol’s experiments was to see whether people would ‘act themselves’ (or more like themselves) oncethe director’s presence was removed. Warhol himself often supported his own status as a ‘non-director’ in hisclaims to being clueless and naïve in all his art. However, what Warhol often knowingly achieved was theopposite effect, especially when others were involved in the collaborative process. As Douglas Crimp suggests:

The genius of Warhol was founded not least in his uncanny ability always to secure for himself the authorfunction, which he underlined by protesting that he rarely had much at all to do with making his work,admitting openly that his work was really the yield of others – others’ ideas, others’ designs, others’ images,others’ abilities, other’s labour. But the more Warhol protested, the more he alone was credited.92

I N TRODUCT I ON 19

Any description of Warhol’s production would be incomplete if it did not take collective work into account.Working together makes work meaningful for the individual, and the fanaticism that determines thecharacter of so much strictly individual production is eliminated in a positive way. So perhaps Warholappears as a ‘genius’ after all – a genius of a time for a people whose insecurity makes the collectivesolution the only satisfactory one. 83

What we do know about Warhol is that he solicited ideas and suggestions from other people in the spirit ofexchange, cooperation and collaboration. As an artist, he was open to suggestions rather than closed andintrospective. Collaboration was central to Warhol’s artistic process since the liaising with art directors andmagazine editors in the 1950s; even the artist’s mother can be counted among his collaborators in lendingher calligraphic skills to Warhol’s iconic signature. One of the most frequently documented biographicalmoments in Warhol’s career is the time when Henry Geldzahler suggested to Warhol that he had concernedhimself enough with painting life, and that it was time for a little death – allegedly resulting in the 1962–3Death and Disaster series.84 Others have noted that Warhol ‘asked me for advice but he never took it’ andthat ‘he would ask your opinion very sweetly and nicely, and then do as he chose’.85

The three haircut movies, Haircut (No. 1), Haircut (No. 2) and Haircut (No. 3), all from late 1963/early1964, are good examples of the collaborative context and process that defines this particular authorshipdiscourse. The only one filmed at the Factory, Haircut (No. 3) (1964), is comprised of twelve 100-ft reelstotalling 47 minutes when projected at 16fps. In this film, Billy Name is cutting Johnny Dodd’s hairthroughout. The individual set-ups clearly accentuate the faces of Name and Dodd, which often appeartogether in one shot; while they are not physically touching each other’s faces, there is always a suggestionof contact. This kind of homoerotic touching, rendered visually rather than physically, seems to be aWarholian trope: Richard Meyer discusses the overlapping bodies in the ‘Double Elvis’ screen print (1963)as activating ‘the erotic possibility of man on man contact’.86 We can see it also in some of the blotted ink‘untitled’ male silhouettes from 1953, which are highly sexual in their near touching.87 In Haircut (No. 3),there are both minute and exaggerated homoerotic details: Name delicately blows hair from Dodd’s face, for instance, as the latter leans his head back, eyes closed, almost ecstatic. The majority of Haircut (No. 3)uses high-contrast film that emphasises the chiaroscuro lighting and the shifts between darkness and light.As a lighting designer, Name helped with the lighting set-ups, as he did on other Warhol films. In onemedium shot, the only lit parts of the image are the faces, arms and brass tacks on the chair. Thesecontrasts in lighting, along with the film’s use of carefully composed medium shots and medium close-ups,all impart a highly aestheticised sense of style. It is worth noting, however, that there are also poorly lit reels,and colour reels printed as black and white, possibly mistakes, which are (typically for Warhol) included aspart of the finished film.

In addition to operating as a collaborator in constructing the ‘look’ of the Haircut films, Billy Name wasalso the star barber in all three, having learned to cut hair from his grandfather. Most of the men getting theirhair cut or watching the ‘action’ were from the same circle of friends: they came from differentinterconnected artistic groups, associated through avant-garde dance and ‘the downtown mimeographicpublication community’ that produced titles like The Floating Bear, Fuck You and C: A Journal of Poetry.88

Reva Wolf, who documents these interconnections and collaborations, also likens Warhol’s film-makingpractices to the mimeographic scene, in that films often reveal personal details and gossip about theperformers. Films were shown in places where the cast would also perform in dance pieces or poetryreadings; they were shown with notable immediacy between recording and exhibition because theyeschewed the time lag normally associated with editing, post-production, and conventional film distributionand promotion patterns.89

The idea of community and collaboration as well as exchange and influence was an important aspect ofartistic and cultural practice in this location at this time. Roy Grundmann, in his chapter on Haircut (No. 1) inthis book, explores some of these ideas further. Most of Warhol’s on-screen stars between 1964 and 1966were also associated with other artistic milieus such as theatre, poetry, dance and fine art. From a singleidea or event, such as Name’s haircutting parties or Jill Johnston dancing, a number of interrelated andcollaborative texts would emerge, each with their own author. This is typical of a context in which differentcommunities were often in dialogue with one another, either through direct collaboration personally, socially,economically, or via allusion to a shared idea worthy of treatment through various forms of creativeexpression. The Haircut films are one such collaborative text; Batman Dracula, with its entourage ofperformers, poets, dancers, singers, critics, lighting designers and film directors, is another. The idea of the collective was a strong and binding concept producing an artistic vanguard through collaboration. While often fraught with antagonisms, fallings-out and jealousies, it nonetheless shaped the historically andculturally specific artistic scene of New York in the 1960s.90


Brigid Berlin in Bad (1976)

Disavowal was one of Warhol’s cleverest devices. Bourdon quotes his pronouncement that ‘paintings aretoo hard’.93 Warhol also told Glen O’Brien prior to the latter’s involvement with Interview, ‘at that timeanyone who turned on the camera was the director’.94 His celebrated performances of disavowal anddetachment led critics like Parker Tyler to use this as the basis for interpretation of the films, referring toWarhol (in opposition to Brakhage) as being of an ‘unintellectual temperament’, and ‘calculatedly naïve anduntheoretical’.95 By not taking authorial responsibility, Warhol allowed critics to interpret the work as havingno point and no meaning – which clearly amused the artist. It was a ‘put-on’ – much like the other discourseof Warhol-as-machine in which art was the work of technology rather than a person.

Authorship-as-conflict

The process of film-making and collaboration was not without tension and discord; many of Warhol’s artisticrelationships took the form of productive conflicts, some of which eventually became fallouts. One of Warhol’smain collaborators in his film-making was the playwright Ronald Tavel. Douglas Crimp has claimed that therelationship between Warhol and Tavel was one of ‘the most productive artistic collaborations in the history of the avant garde’.96 Crimp has championed Tavel as a corrective to the asymmetry of Warhol’s authorialdominance and he covers in detail the cultural politics, collaborative frictions and artistic outcomes of theirrelationship as it is played out in the films Kitchen (1965), Horse (1965) and The Life of Juanita Castro.97

However, it is worth pausing to say a little more about their working relationship – in particular, about authorialconflict in their collaborative adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the film Vinyl.

Warhol’s idea of adapting A Clockwork Orange dates to his collaboration with John Palmer and HenryRomney, around the time of Empire in 1964, when they tried to form a film company.98 Warhol may havetalked about purchasing the rights to the novel and might even have said that he had done so, but there is no contract or documentary evidence in the Anthony Burgess Foundation to suggest that he did.99

The name change from Alex in the novel to Victor in the film also suggests that Vinyl was a clandestine orunofficial adaptation; certainly, none of the advertising copy ever makes reference to A Clockwork Orange.According to Tavel’s script, Vinyl was shot at the Factory on 15 April 1965 after a week of rehearsals. The film is comprised of two 33-minute reels, shot in black and white, and with sound.100 Vinyl is a key titlein Warhol’s relationship to gay cinema (a topic we will discuss in detail shortly): the film was called Leatherat one point, depicts gay S&M subculture, and in 1967 was often double-billed with My Hustler on 42ndStreet. ‘Real’ S&M takes place in the background of the film, on submissive Larry Latreille, while the tortureof Gerard Malanga’s Victor occurs in the foreground, a torture that is gruelling to watch but clearly


Vinyl (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 67 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of CarnegieInstitute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

performed under the auspices of art. Violence in Vinyl is in some respects also a meditation on cinematicrealism: Are we seeing real violence? Is the background more ‘real’ than the performance in the foreground(it appears so) – and, if so, why? Why after about thirty minutes does the violence in the film becomeboring, unsensational? Malanga recounts actually being embarrassed at seeing the film (‘the movie makes afool of me’, he says), even though he has been credited as prompting the adaptation in the first place andwould go on to feature in some of the other S&M-themed Factory films, Kiss the Boot and Whips I and II(all 1966), shown as background reels for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.101

Vinyl is literally 66 minutes of torture for two of the film’s stars at least, and quite possibly for an audienceunable to endure the onslaught of sadistic abuse towards Victor. Gregory Battcock, who appeared in someof the other Tavel-scripted films, writes that ‘The use of film as a device to torment its audience may beunderstood as an intellectual challenge; certainly it forces an alert viewer to come to new terms with art.’102

It would seem that Vinyl is particularly concerned with the theme of torment or torture, both in terms of what it depicts and how it was made. While the audience may be cruelly tormented by the on-screen torture ofVictor, who is forced to inhale poppers under a leather hood and blasted with The Kinks’ song ‘Tired ofWaiting for You’ on repeat, the torment occurring at the level of production was of an equal measure. Tavelhas recounted that Warhol did everything possible to usurp the pre-production and planning of the film bysending Malanga out on errands when he was supposed to be learning his lines. The result is that the deliveryof his scripted lines is stilted and awkward, read from giant idiot boards off screen. Yet the performance thatresults from Warhol’s interference with, or sabotage of, Tavel’s careful planning of the script is what makesVinyl so defiantly uncommercial and radical in its vision of what constitutes film acting. The final torment forTavel occurred when an unexpected visit to the Factory by Edie Sedgwick ‘with her hair dyed silver, no less’resulted in her last-minute casting as the girl on the trunk who occupies the right of the frame. In a moviedevised for an all-male cast, ‘she ended up stealing the film and becoming a star overnight’.103

Conflict, tension and sabotage occur on different levels in the film and between the three authors of thetext – not just Tavel and Warhol, but also Anthony Burgess. Vinyl only adapts part of A Clockwork Orange,although it distils out the novel’s central ideas of recreational violence, juvenile delinquency and the cure forsuch violence. Tavel committed violence against the notion of adaptation itself, a process that is usuallytreated with respect, fidelity and meticulousness: as he admits, ‘I got bored and just stopped in the middleof the novel’.104 Analysis of Vinyl thus reveals a failure to collaborate and a failure to adapt according toconventional norms – but those intentional failures and conflicts are what make the film such a rich text.Returning to Douglas Crimp, he suggests that the Tavel/Warhol collaborations are interesting because theyare failures of cooperation. We would add, especially in relation to Vinyl, that their films together might beseen as acts of violence against the authorship-function and any claims a creator may have to ‘owning’ atext. Ultimately, Vinyl is a valuable example of how authorship-as-conflict can result in nuanced and quiteradical forms of adaptation, acting, script production and textual content.

Projection and exhibition histories

How have Warhol’s films been shown, and how should they be screened? Prior to removing them from publiccirculation, where did Warhol exhibit his films, and how did audiences respond to and interact with them?Historical accounts of Warhol’s circle in the 1960s often include anecdotal tales about individual screenings.However, there is a need for an in-depth history of the range of ways in which individual titles have beenscreened, both before 1972 and after their re-emergence and restoration, and how this has affected thereception and interpretation of the films. Due to the enormous number of movies that Warhol made, though,and the ways in which they were stored, reconstructing a full screening history of the Factory’s cinema outputmay be impossible. In a 1971 article published in Art in America, David Bourdon criticised the state of Warhol’sfilm archive, and highlighted some of the difficulties in accounting for the exhibition history of his work:

Scores of movies were shot [by Warhol], but entire reels and projects were abandoned, and only what wasfelt to be successful was publicly shown. No authoritative record was ever kept of titles, dates, number ofreels, cast and collaborators. … Nevertheless, many of the films have been damaged, or have totallyvanished; even the original print of Sleep is missing. In other cases, such as the twenty-five-hour-long **** (Four Stars), cans of films are present, but nobody has any idea in what sequence they were originallyshown. The casual attitude toward shooting the movies carried over into their projection. Even in regularscreenings at commercial theatres, the reels were inexplicably jumbled, or one reel was deleted from oneshowing but not the next, leading to such wholesale variations that some reviewers began citing the dateand hour of the performance they had attended. It is unlikely that very many of the films will ever beaccurately reconstructed as they were originally screened – which is symptomatic of the ‘benign neglect’with which Warhol treats all of his work.105


Face (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 66 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of CarnegieInstitute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

altered their reception in comparison to more conventional single-screen showings. Any sound from thefilms would have been largely drowned out by the Velvet Underground; juxtapositions between individualfilm works may have provided meanings that were originally unintended; the beam of the projectors and thescreens themselves became unstable entities, susceptible to blockage and interruption. At some Up-Tightscreenings – such as the infamous debut at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry which took place atDelmonico’s Hotel on 13 January – ‘once the concert began the audience found themselves subjected tothe guerrilla-type assaults of filmmaker Barbara Rubin, who, with the help of Jonas Mekas, thrust flood lightsand running movie cameras into their faces’.112 Such interpersonal attacks would only further prevent theaudience from paying attention to individual components of the spectacle.

Warhol’s Up-Tight and EPI events often feature in historical accounts and theoretical discussions of‘expanded cinema’ – an additional category or concept used to frame some of Warhol’s cinema output.Sheldon Renan coined the term ‘expanded cinema’ in his 1967 book An Introduction to the AmericanUnderground Film: he described it as ‘cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may beproduced without the use of film at all’.113 In the preface to his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, GeneYoungblood provides the following (even less tangible) definition:

When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does notmean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s historical drive to manifest his consciousness outsideof his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialise in a single discipline and hope truthfully toexpress a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of theintermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind. 114

A more concrete summary of ‘expanded cinema’ as a form of practice was provided by Jonas Mekas:

Light is there; motion is there; the screen is there, and the filmed image, very often, is there; but it cannot bedescribed or experienced in terms you describe or experience the Griffith cinema, the Godard cinema, oreven Brakhage cinema … It has much to do with other arts, painting, sculpture, Happenings, environment,music, but the cinema aspect of light, screen (in a number of different forms), images (filmed or producedby other means), motion dominate these works.115

I N TRODUCT I ON 25

From a present-day perspective, Bourdon’s critique retains some of its charge. Despite the stellar efforts atreconstructing Warhol’s oeuvre being undertaken by the Whitney and MoMA in New York, contributors tothis volume have experienced difficulties with individual screenings of particular titles: almost inaudiblesound due to a problem with projection equipment, for instance, or reels being shown in the wrong order, orviewing seemingly ‘complete’ edits of notoriously ‘incomplete’ or ‘unfinished’ films. This issue is raised herein order to highlight a further complication in undertaking Warhol film scholarship: even when individualworks are tracked down and viewed, the exigencies of the screening experience may not be the mostconducive to clarifying understanding.

Clearly, certain screening spaces were used by Warhol more regularly than others to show his work. In 1963, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative run by Jonas Mekas utilised two spaces in New York to exhibit films:a loft on Park Avenue South, and the midnight screening slot at the Bleecker Street Cinema. During thatyear, Mekas screened Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …, Sleep and reels of Kiss.106 And in 1967, anumber of New York cinemas, including the New Cinema Playhouse, 42nd Street Cinema, The RegencyTheater, York Cinema, St Marks Theater and The Hudson Theater showed a selection of Warhol’ssexploitation works.107 While arrangements with the majority of these cinemas were purely commercial,Warhol recognised the Film-Makers’ Cooperative venues as a supportive communal space in whichexperimental/underground film-makers could screen their work for each other. Aside from brief instances ofstability, however, Warhol’s films were – and continue to be – screened in a polyglot array of venues, mainlygalleries and cinemas.

One especially complex aspect of Warhol’s film exhibition history is the multimedia extravaganzas thatthe artist assembled in 1966, which went under the names of ‘Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight’ and the ‘ExplodingPlastic Inevitable’ (or EPI). ‘Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight’ was initially a one-off event in January; further Up-Tightshows took place during a week in February 1966 before a US tour in March.108 EPI ran for longer: Warholrented the Dom in New York throughout the month of April before taking the show on a US tour for most of1966 and well into 1967; the tour concluded back in New York in April 1967.109 Branden Joseph provides avaluable description of what these performance events incorporated:

At the height of its development, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable included three to five film projectors, oftenshowing different reels of the same film simultaneously; a similar number of slide projectors, movable byhand so that their images swept the auditorium; four variable-speed strobe lights; three moving spots withan assortment of coloured gels; several pistol lights; a mirror ball hung from the ceiling and another on thefloor; as many as three loudspeakers blaring different pop records at once; one to two sets by the VelvetUnderground and Nico; and the dancing of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov or Ingrid Superstar,complete with props and lights that projected their shadows high onto the wall.110

Joseph quotes from one advert for the EPI, which lists the films being screened as including Vinyl, Sleep,Eat, Kiss, Empire, Whips, Face, Harlot, Hedy, Couch, Banana and Blow Job.111 The use – or recycling, orinterpellation – of these films into the cacophony of the Up-Tight/EPI performances would have significantly


I N TRODUCT I ON 27

Youngblood briefly discusses the EPI, which he describes as a ‘hellish sensorium’, as a ‘unique andeffective discotheque environment’ which ‘has never been equalled’.116 However, he concentrates more onRonald Nameth’s film record of the EPI, rather than the performances themselves; Nameth’s movie clearlyonly manages to capture a fleeting, framed perspective on the ‘sensorium’.

Certainly, an argument can be made that during the period from 1966 to 1968, Warhol was primarilyinterested in exhibiting films employing ‘expanded cinema’ techniques. Outer and Inner Space (1965),according to Callie Angell, was ‘Warhol’s first double-screen film’ and thus ‘an important transitionalwork’.117 Edie Sedgwick was filmed sitting in front of a monitor which plays a pre-recorded videotape ofherself talking: the ‘film’ Sedgwick appears to interact with the ‘video’ Sedgwick. When the two reels of thefilm are exhibited next to each other in double projection, four Sedgwick heads appear on screen – an echo,perhaps, of Warhol’s screen-print works like ‘Edith Scull 36 Times’ (1963) which replicate the same face inmultiple iterations. Outer and Inner Space had its premiere at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on 27January 1966 in a double bill with Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), which also used twoprojectors simultaneously – in Rubin’s case, with one image superimposed on the other. In an essay onWarhol’s film, J. Hoberman, pace Callie Angell, has pointed out that ‘in its wake, nearly every film that hemade was shown in some sort of multiple screen format’.118 A list of these films would include: a recordingof Robert Heide’s stage play The Bed, documented with two cameras and exhibited as a dual-screen work;Lupe, which Angell notes was ‘shown as a double- or even triple-screen film – there are, in fact, three reelsof this film – and was at one point projected in triple screen as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable’;119

the double-screen The Chelsea Girls.


Warhol’s final experiment with ‘expanded cinema’ was arguably **** (Four Stars), a 25-hour film that has only been shown once – on 15 and 16 December 1967 at the New Cinema Playhouse in New York.Like Rubin’s film, **** was screened with two reels superimposed on the screen. A huge number of reelswere shown; many of these were drawn from other shorter works that had been made and exhibitedthroughout 1967. Wayne Koestenbaum has referred to **** as ‘Warhol’s Finnegan’s Wake or 120 Days ofSodom – hubristic compendium and enclosure, an encyclopedia of every transfiguration he ever dreamed,final as a mausoleum and fanatical as a menagerie’.120 Warhol provides a record of the event:

The screening we had of **** in December at the Cinematheque – the one and only time we ever screenedall twenty-five consecutive hours of it – brought back all our early days of shooting movies just for the funand beauty of getting down what was happening with the people we knew. … At the time I didn’t think ofthat screening as any kind of milestone, but looking back, I can see that it marked the end of the periodwhen we made movies just to make them. … Some people stayed through the entire screening, somedrifted in and out, some were asleep in the lobby, some were asleep in their seats, and some were like me,they couldn’t take their eyes off the screen for a single second. The strange thing was, this was the firsttime I was seeing it all myself – we’d just come straight to the theatre with all the reels. I knew we’d neverscreen it in this long way again, so it was like life, our lives, flashing in front of us – it would just go by onceand we’d never see it again.121

Like Empire or Sleep, **** was an exercise in durational cinema. And like the Up-Tight and EPI events, theone-off screening was a discordant experience, presenting its viewers with the challenge of attempting toprocess two simultaneously presented layers. Callie Angell, writing in 1994, was unsure whether **** couldbe reconstituted and projected in facsimile:

no notes or other papers have yet been found to indicate exactly how the reels were projected or how thesound tracks were handled. The projection arrangements and order of reels do not seem to have beenentirely arbitrary; Warhol did hold experimental screenings of portions of **** beginning in the summer of1967, one of which was attended by Michelangelo Antonioni.122

****, then, serves as an emblematic example of the difficulties Warhol film scholarship faces in trying toaccount for exhibition history: in the absence of adequate records it is impossible to recreate this uniqueevent.

Warhol and gay cinema

Warhol’s film output has been productively contextualised in relation to ‘underground’/avant-garde cinema,and artistic movements such as Pop, Minimalism and abstract art; some of his later films can also be framedas instances of ‘expanded cinema’. It is also vital to recognise his movies as occupying a key position in thehistory of gay/queer film. Not only do his movies continue to serve as inspiration to contemporary queerdirectors – Apichatpong Weerasethakul identifies Empire as a significant influence, while Bruce LaBruce’sSuper 81⁄2 (1994) is suffused with Warholian elements – but they altered the content, form and grammar ofunderground queer film. The experimental cinema made by gay men in the US prior to Warhol first pickingup a Bolex tended to be somewhat poetic, focused on individual figures drifting in and out of dream statesor imagined scenarios: Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1948) or Gregory Markopoulos’s Christmas U.S.A.(1949), for instance. In contrast, Warhol’s cinema explicitly depicted men coupling (in Kiss, Three, Vinyl andCouch, for example), or flirting with each other (such as in My Hustler, San Diego Surf and The Loves ofOndine), or as part of a group of idiosyncratic individuals whose dominant libidinal dynamic is fluid andopaque, polymorphously perverse if not explicitly queer.123 Warhol’s cinema also offered an alternative tothe studied Romantic framing, subtle lighting and employment of purposeful and rhythmic editing of earliergay cinema: instead, he substituted bold and sometimes harshly oriented light sources, the long take andstatic camera placement which was only in later years supplemented with some panning and zooming.

For Marc Siegel, Andy Warhol is a key figure in queer cultural history, and his film-making is central tothis position:

Andy Warhol’s life and work, which spanned the homophobic 1950s and the sexual liberation of the 1960sand 1970s and continued through the post-Stonewall era, play a major role in just about any significantaccount of twentieth-century queer history. … Warhol’s Marilyns, Lizas, Elvises, and Warrens, for example,implicitly attest to a longstanding gay male interest in flamboyant female and sexy male stars. But it is his


Kiss (1963–4). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 54 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of CarnegieInstitute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Edies, Ondines, Candys, Jackies, and Hollys, that is, his film work and the well-known context of his filmproduction – the Factory of the 1960s – that explicitly represented the open-ended desires and glamorousqueer differences of the years prior to the institutionalisation of the gay liberation movement. … Andy Warholwas not just any old twentieth-century fag, but one whose life and multimedia art production offered andcontinues to offer to legions of young queers the exaltedly blatant promise of another way of life.124

Certainly it is difficult, when looking at Warhol’s artistic output in a variety of media, to ignore its queerness.Arguably, this is particularly the case with his films. And yet, as the editors of the book Pop Out: QueerWarhol mention in their introduction, reflecting on critical and theoretical texts on Warhol,

with few exceptions, most considerations of Warhol have ‘de-gayed’ him. Warhol’s critics have usuallyaggressively elided issues around sexuality or relegated his queerness to the realm of the ‘biographical’ or‘private’ to usher in his oeuvre to the world of high art. Or when they have alluded to Warhol’s sexuality,usually without mentioning that he was gay (more often ‘asexual’ or ‘voyeuristic’), it has only been in order tomoralise about the ‘degraded’ quality of Warhol’s art, his career and his friends.125

Simon Watney has highlighted that most critical discussions of Warhol’s work argue that it is centrallyconcerned with various topics: the painting process, abstraction, banality, class struggle. ‘There is certainlystill a powerful and influential critical view’, he writes, ‘that the value of Warhol’s films and the rest of hisnonfilmic work lies in their concern with such lofty abstractions as time, death, process, and so forth. But never sex, let alone queer sex.’126 Of course, a significant amount of Warhol’s work was producedbefore the Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969 – in other words, during an era when treading carefully around matters of queer sexuality was a necessity. The Pop Outeditors recognise this fact:

de-gaying and strategic silences may have been … useful to Warhol as a survival strategy … Warhol’srelatively ‘straight assumption’ to the art world pantheon, for example, also located him in a position ofrelative authority from which he could sponsor and nourish queer communities, projects, and energies. Thus, even given the mutually enabling relationships between Warhol and various gay communities andWarhol’s devotion to making queer sex visible, public, and sexy, Warhol was never entirely ‘out’ nor ‘in’ thecloset. In turns, he was both and neither, depending on context, exigency, and survival.127

One example of this is provided by John Giorno, the sleeper in Sleep (although it has to be conceded thathe is far from a reliable narrator): ‘The art world was homophobic, and an ever-present threat. Anyone whowas gay was at a disadvantage. … Andy got around homophobia by making the movie Sleep into anabstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.’128 And yet the physical intimacy ofSleep, the camera’s (and thus director’s) proximity to the prone form, and the film’s aestheticisation of themale body all contribute to its undeniable homoerotic allure.

In the pages of POPism, Warhol explicitly refers to his homosexuality. Early on in the 1960s, he askedEmile de Antonio over dinner why the Abstract Expressionists didn’t like him; ‘De’ told Warhol, ‘You’re tooswish, and that upsets them.’129 Warhol reflects on this:

It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because … I didn’t want to change anyway …[A]s for the ‘swish’ thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that – just watching the expressions on people’sfaces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish.130

In a later section of the book, Warhol writes about ‘becoming the target for some very aggressive attacks ondrugs and homosexuality’:

I would think, ‘Why are they attacking us? Why aren’t they out there attacking, say, Broadway musicals,where there are probably more fags in any one production than there are at the whole Factory? … Why us?when all I have to do is turn on my TV to see hundreds of actors who are so gay you can’t believe your eyesand nobody bothers them.’ … Naturally, the Factory had fags; we were in the entertainment business and –That’s Entertainment! Naturally, the Factory had more fags than, say, Congress, but it probably wasn’t evenas gay as your favourite TV police show. The Factory was a place where you could let your ‘problems’ showand nobody would hate you for it.131


(top) Flesh (1968); (above) Lonesome Cowboys (1968) Trash (1970)


More Milk Yvette (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 66 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum ofCarnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

suffused with campness: primarily, this manifestsin enticing audiences to consider the beauty ineveryday objects, and to recognise the importanceof the marginal and the superficial. Warhol’s screenprints of popular cultural icons like Elizabeth Taylor,Troy Donahue and Elvis Presley raised such populistfigures to the rarefied heights of the art world. At thesame time, his films made ‘superstars’ of streethustlers, social misfits and drag queens. Standardsof taste are blurred and confused by his work. Sucha challenge to accepted forms of taste was also, of course, an attack on Abstract Expressionism; as opposed to the aggressively masculine timbre of the work of such painters as Jackson Pollock,Warhol’s focus on the ‘feminine’ concerns of filmicons and everyday household products (soup, soappowder, soft drinks) challenged the gendered statusof art praxis.

The Factory’s prolific film-making activity wascentred on a shifting group of actors andpersonalities that included drag queens, camp and almost excessively verbal gay men such asTaylor Mead and Ondine, pretty boys and studs,Brigid Berlin, who gloriously defies classification,and some ‘heterosexual women’; about the lattergroup Thomas Waugh has suggested, ‘it seemsmore productive to read Warhol’s females as“queens” rather than as “women”’.136 As RichardDyer writes,

These stars are representative figures of the gayunderground … Berlin and Bruce … point outthat all these figures are the kind of people ‘on whose backs Hollywood was built, both on screen and off(closeted gay actors, actresses, and directors, set designers, wardrobe and make-up people, mistresses and gigolos, etc.)’, yet who were portrayed on screen ‘as tragic or indecent figures’. The Warhol films putthem centre screen, and what’s more have them then ape Hollywood’s on-screen images, precisely, as inthe references about Lamarr, Turner, Velez, Montez, or more generally in the transvestites’ appropriation of glamour and the hustlers’ approximations of the sullen hunkiness of Brando, Dean, Presley and co. So here were these perverts, who were always anyway the unspoken part of Hollywood’s history, nowopenly in the movies and putting on the very put-ons of glamour and sexuality that Hollywood had beenpeddling for so long.137

The ‘aping’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘put-ons’, however, are not attempts to replicate mainstream cinema style.Rather, they offer up a queer parody of Hollywood and its standardised formats: realism is not attained orattempted; performances fail or are derailed; generic forms (the biopic, the Western) are ripped apart due toinappropriate casting (Mario Montez as Lana Turner in More Milk Yvette [1965], for example) and a lack ofnarrative incident and structure. Performances in Warhol’s films take particular forms, all of which challengeconventional notions of acting skill: overt theatricality; ‘jacked up’ drug performances; avant-garde posturing;a reliance on cue cards and off-screen direction; relentless monologuing, sometimes delivered in anaffectless drone.

This challenging performance style was regularly combined with an eroticised looking at the male body. R. Bruce Brasell, in an essay on My Hustler, has suggested that the gaze directed by Warhol’scamera towards attractive men is similar to the look of the gay man cruising: surreptitious, voyeuristic,aestheticising.138 For Thomas Waugh, the dominant sexual dynamic of Warhol’s cinema is that of the tease,‘an erotic enunciation orchestrated like a tantalizing power game [which] was still the characteristic eroticrhetoric of sixties public culture, the sexual revolution notwithstanding … [T]he promise of gratification wasroutinely deferred and rarely fulfilled.’139 This dynamic was a variation on that on offer in other forms of gayerotic cinema:

Warhol, then, wrote openly about his own queerness and that of others at the Factory. The widespreadavailability of this evidence, alongside the overt content of much of Warhol’s artistic work, makes the critical‘de-gaying’ of his practice even more astonishing. However, Pop Out, along with other recent publicationsincluding Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me, Roy Grundmann’s Blow Job and Richard Meyer’s OutlawRepresentations that have all identified the significance of Warhol’s queerness in understanding his output,seem to have affected a great deal of subsequent criticism: it is now relatively rare to read critical writingson Warhol that do not acknowledge his sexuality as key to understanding his practice.132 Here it is worthbriefly highlighting three elements of his film work that contribute to their queer tone and content:campness, his entourage and their ‘performance style’, and the gaze.

Richard Dyer, in his discussion of the US cinema’s gay underground, recognises the shift that occurredin the 1960s away from the poetic:

Sixties gay underground films belong with camp and pop art, in various ways exploring surface, role, artificeand the detritus of mass culture. Their formal strategies may be seen as part of the denaturalising,trivialising impulse of some forms of gay language.133

In Philip Core’s dictionary of camp, there are entries for (among other associated people and themes) CandyDarling, Joe Dallesandro, Pop Art and the Sixties, Edie Sedgwick, the Velvet Underground, and AndyWarhol.134 Certainly, the majority of Warhol’s films were produced during a period when mainstreamawareness of camp taste was gathering pace. One significant contribution to this growing recognition wasSusan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964); and as Peter Wollen notes, ‘[r]eading Sontag’s essay todayis like reading through a litany of Warhol’s tastes, allusions and affinities.’135 Andy Warhol’s artworks are

The pretense that an erotic image had to be art or exercise instruction was yet a painful recent memory, anda gay porno consumer’s first impulse was still to declare he was a bodybuilder or art student (with the lawusually but not always pretending to believe both). Here surely is where Warhol and his generationborrowed their love of the interactive put-on, their pleasure in the games of open secrets and winkingcovers …140

This erotic charge was not merely confined to Warhol’s film oeuvre: it also suffused other aspects of hisartistic output. Thus Richard Meyer argues that the scandal caused by Warhol’s World Fair mural of‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’ (1964) – which resulted in it being painted over shortly after the unveiling –was due to the troubling confusion between ‘Wanted Men’ meaning those who are wanted for criminaloffences, and those who are wanted for reasons associated with sex.141 One of the queerest aspects ofmuch of Warhol’s work, from the early boy drawings of the 1950s to the salacious and sexually explicitPolaroids of the 1970s, is its foregrounding of a gay gaze at attractive men, a persistent eroticised lookingand longing which continues to trouble some audiences and critics.

Warhol’s final film

If it is difficult to untangle with accuracy what Warhol’s first film was, it is equally complicated to identify withcertainty his final movie. This is due to three main complications: first, the increasing role that Paul Morrisseyplayed in the making of Warhol’s films during the 1960s; second, the attachment of Warhol’s name to anumber of film projects into the 1970s, his authorship of which (and contribution to) remains contested;third, Warhol’s continued work throughout the 1970s and 80s with video and television that channelledsome of his passions and thematic interests into other screen media. In this final section of our introduction,then, these topics will be briefly addressed; once again, it is worth noting the challenges that these pose tothe undertaking of Warhol film scholarship.

Morrissey joined Warhol’s entourage in 1965, after making some experimental films of his own such as1964’s All Aboard the Dreamland Choo-Choo and Like Sleep. He was an important figure in the ‘expandedcinema’ events of 1966 that featured the Velvet Underground. In 1967, the year of Warhol’s sexploitationcycle and ****, he attempted to alter the course of Warhol’s film-making:

Paul thought the Factory should be more under control, more like a regular office. He wanted it to becomea real moviemaking-moneymaking business enterprise, and he never could see the point of having all theyoung kids and old kids hanging around all the time for no particular reason. … Paul turned out to be agood office manager. He was the one who’d talk to business people, read Variety, and look around forgood-looking or funny (ideally, both) kids to be in our movies. … to make the Factory into more of the‘business office’ he had in mind, Paul put partitions up around one-third of the floor space, dividing the loftinto little cubicles. The intention was to let people know that the Factory was now a place where actualbusiness was conducted – typewriter/paper clip/manila envelope/filing cabinet business. It didn’t exactlywork out the way he’d envisioned it, though; people started using the cubicles for sex.142

Warhol clearly states, however, that ‘Paul wasn’t doing any of the photography on our movies yet – I wasstill doing it all.’143 The division in many historical accounts occurs in 1968, with the first instalment of theFlesh/Trash/Heat trilogy. The direction of these films is usually attributed to Morrissey, but with Warhol’sguiding hand still identified as an influence.144

Morrissey’s accounts of the years 1965 to 1967 are different. A chief characteristic of his version ofevents is that Warhol was detached, uninvolved and tended to ‘stylize by indirection’.145 Morrissey hasoften taken claim for stylistic shifts and commercial impetuses, and credits himself with realising asubstantial number of films and significant advances in Warhol’s film-making. Morrissey’s filmography,published on his own website, cites himself as director and cinematographer on The Chelsea Girls,director and writer on The Loves of Ondine (1967), director and cinematographer on Imitation of Christ,and director, cinematographer, writer and producer on Lonesome Cowboys (1968).146 According toMaurice Yacowar,

Paul Morrissey was the presiding force of creative control in the ‘Warhol films’ from My Hustler [1965] to Lonesome Cowboys (1968). The casting, cuing of actors, prompting of plot, arrangement of locations,editing, and ‘whatever directing these films had, came from me’, Morrissey avows. Morrissey even set thelights and prepared the camera; all Warhol had to do was operate it.147


(top) Trash (1970); (above) Heat (1971)

In the words of Morrissey himself,

There wasn’t much direction in these experiments but whatever directing was done, I did. Andy just aimedthe camera. It was Andy’s notion – and it did grow into a kind of ‘concept’ – that the camera should not beturned off. But I could see there was a law of diminishing returns, which Andy couldn’t see. Once I was fullyin the driver’s seat, long before Flesh, then I went for more effects, with a story and longer shooting that Iwould then cut down. Bike Boy, I, a Man, all were done like that and then edited down.148

Elsewhere, he has been less generous:

The burden I’ve lived under is that people have to think I must’ve had such a great experience working withAndy Warhol and learning those things. Andy was subservient to a degree that is mind-boggling. If anybodyelse had said ‘we’ll cut this out now’, it would have been cut out. No matter what I said, he agreed to it. Hedidn’t come up with things himself. He was so hesitant and frightened of his own things that when he wouldmake suggestions, unless the suggestions were seconded by somebody, and this only person was me, theywouldn’t have happened. He was not a creative person and so many creative things he’s been given creditfor are things that I deliberately did.149

Douglas Crimp, in his analysis of Warhol’s collaborations with Ronald Tavel, identifies the marked artisticand temperamental differences between the two men. However, he suggests that these differences werechannelled productively into their work together, such that they could be described as ‘coming together tostay apart’.150 The same cannot be said of the fraught relationship between Warhol and Morrissey. Perhapsthe clash was caused by differing conceptions of the role of the director: Morrissey was wedded to a notionof the film director as auteur, in control of every element of production, whereas Warhol – as we haveexplored in depth – conceived of film-making practice in relation to notions of collaboration, disavowal and conflict.

Although Warhol removed his 1960s movies from circulation in the early 70s, his name continued to be connected to particular film projects throughout the decade: L’Amour (1970); Women in Revolt (1971),and the horror double bill of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974); Bad (1976).151

Morrissey was involved in the making of the first four of these titles; the latter, which Stephen Koch identifiesas ‘rightly named’,152 was directed by Jed Johnson, but marketed as ‘Andy Warhol’s Bad’. The run of filmsfrom Flesh to Bad has attained relatively widespread distribution, both in cinemas and on home-viewingformats, and so (somewhat perversely) are among the most seen ‘Warhol movies’. Another claim toauthorship of Flesh for Frankenstein has been voiced by the Italian director Antonio Margheriti, a pioneer ofItalian gothic horror in the 1960s, who singles himself out as the creative force behind the film; indeed, he isoften credited as the film’s director in European territories. Margheriti recounts that

I really directed a lot. I got involved because, when Paul Morrissey came to Rome to start with AndyWarhol’s Frankenstein, they arrived with four pages of script and they wanted to shoot a 3-D picture theway they had done with movies like Flesh: with the camera standing in one corner running for 10 minuteswithout a cut and that’s it! … A lot of the scenes in the treatment had to be rewritten for the script, orentirely invented, and that was all up to me. For example, all the scenes with the children, who are shown atthe beginning playing with the guillotine. That all came from me 100%, and I shot them after principalphotography was completed. Also, those weird images that gave the film its bizarre flavour, such as thebreathing disembodied lungs, came from me. I shot a lot of the special effects scenes.153

The attribution of directorial authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein may never be resolved. However, there hasbeen a failure to notice Warhol’s spectral presence, not so much in naming the film Andy Warhol’sFrankenstein, but through the scarred body of Frankenstein’s monster: its image in the film and through the promotional materials echoes Warhol’s own stitched-up torso in Richard Avedon’s photographs.

Despite these continued dabblings, by the end of the 1960s Warhol was turning away from cinematowards other moving-image formats: film and video. As Angell notes,

Among his ideas at this time were a feature-length film shot on video for theatrical release on film, and hisown television show, a 6-hour programme for NBC to be called ‘Nothing Special’ (or ‘The Nothing Special’),which, modelled after surveillance video, would consist of nothing but people walking by a camera.154


Jed Johnson and Andy Warhol

Around 1970, Warhol purchased portable video equipment, and began to make videotapes: this resulted inalmost 300 ‘Factory Diaries’, which were recorded between 1970 and 1982 and range in content fromholiday footage shot in Montauk to a recording of Warhol painting a canvas. Producing material fortelevision became an imperative. As Angell writes,

Warhol’s interest in television was inherent in his films from the beginning; his dream of a never-ending, all-inclusive film had already been realised in the multi-channel 24-hour medium of broadcast television, his favourite viewing material. In fact, much of Warhol’s film production seems to have been informed, oftendirectly, by the formats and conventions of television. In addition to the unfinished Soap Opera (1964), a number of Warhol’s films were structured, like television, as ongoing, open-ended collections of episodesgenerated by a single concept.155

Graig Uhlin has explored this idea further, suggesting that television is also an identifiable influence on suchearlier films as Empire.156 As Greg Pierce writes in exhibition notes for the videos Paul Johnson andQuintalogue (both 1965), Warhol’s work for television began with ideas explored on video in the mid-1960s.157 In the same exhibition catalogue, Eva Meyer-Hermann writes,

in his first experiments with formats for television shows in the early 1970s, Warhol drew on his ownexperience behind the camera making films such as Soap Opera, Camp, or The Chelsea Girls. He toyedwith the idea of a television series about a married couple that was constantly quarrelling (Fight), or aboutother configurations in which the group dynamics led to impossible situations where interpersonalcommunications were completely out of control (Vivian’s Girls, Phoney). In these prototype TV shows, reality and fiction are inextricably intertwined.158

Warhol made three television series: Fashion (1979–80), ten episodes of 30 minutes in length; AndyWarhol’s T.V. (1980–2), a first series of which consisted of eighteen episodes of 30 minutes, produced for

Manhattan Cable TV Channel 10, and a second series of which (1983), produced for Madison SquareGarden Network, had nine episodes of 30 minutes; and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1985–7),produced for the MTV network by Andy Warhol T.V. Productions, which only lasted for five episodes, eachof which was 30 minutes long. He also made music videos for Curiosity Killed the Cat, The Cars and otherartists, as well as promotional videotapes for fashion designers. In these works for television, particularinterests of Warhol’s that surfaced throughout his film work of the 1960s are also evident: stardom andcelebrity, and the ways in which these are created; notions of performance; the concept of an alternativecreative community; and so on. Perhaps the last Warhol ‘film’ work needs to be seen as the final episode ofFifteen Minutes that he made for television – and which was broadcast after his death.

Warhol in Ten Takes

In keeping with the format of this introduction, the ten essays collected in this book are organised in anorder that roughly corresponds to the chronology of Warhol’s film-making output (although, as we notedearlier, concretely establishing such a timeline is a significant challenge). The book begins, then, with fourexplorations of his silent works: Couch, Haircut (No. 1), Taylor Mead’s Ass and the seven Screen Tests thatWarhol made of Susan Sontag.

Ara Osterweil examines Couch in relation to Warhol’s other pornographic films, and argues that it is ‘an integral contribution to the birth of a sexually explicit, queer underground cinema of the flesh’ a decadein advance of the proliferation of more mainstream representations of explicit hard-core activity. Osterweilcombines close analysis of Couch with keen contextual observation; she discusses the role of labour in thefilm, the ways in which it depicts queer sexual interactions, its techniques of distraction and its position inthe history of representations of interracial pairings. Roy Grundmann, in his detailed analysis of Haircut (No. 1), argues that the film’s seductive power lies in its combination of two seemingly distinct elements: a provocatively charged sexual tension which lies somewhere on the homosocial–homosexual continuum, and which suggests the space of the titular trimming as a ‘heterotopia’; and an unsettling and vaguelythreatening sense of the uncanny. Having discussed the ways in which Warhol’s film brings together acomplex combination of creative individuals from differing cultural spheres in New York – a combination thatwas not necessarily intended to be harmonious – Grundmann employs a complex theoretical mixture of (andfriction between) Foucault and Freud in order to unpack Haircut (No. 1)’s resonances and affective charge.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s piece on Taylor Mead’s Ass, previously published elsewhere, argues that thefilm ‘operates at the centre of Warhol’s obsessive and lifelong project of investigating the nature of humanpersonality and human embodiment’. Highlighting the provocative (and reactive) nature of the movie,Koestenbaum draws connections between it and Warhol’s other images of asses, as well as suggestingthat the film can be valuably understood as a portrait. In Taylor Mead’s Ass, Mead pretends to insert an arrayof objects into his behind; discussing the relationship of these items to Warhol’s life and career,Koestenbaum concludes that ‘All of Andy is in Taylor Mead’s Ass.’ Mandy Merck’s essay on Susan Sontag’sScreen Tests provides a detailed engagement with the complex relationship between Warhol and Sontag. In many ways, the two figures were alike: they were both iconic and extraordinarily famous; both ‘dismissedthe conventions of authorial origination’; both were fascinated by hierarchies of cultural value and taste.Merck outlines the development of the Screen Tests series, and the circumstances surrounding therecording of Sontag’s reels. Throughout Sontag’s writing career, including her various reflections onportraiture, photography and the ethics of artistic practice, her attitude towards Warhol shifted: as Merckputs it, he ‘is the object of an apparent ambivalence that hardens into denunciation’.

Jon Davies’s essay on Horse and Jean Wainwright’s on Bufferin both provide insight into Warhol’sprocesses of collaboration. Davies explores Warhol’s working relationship with Ronald Tavel (previouslytouched upon in this introduction, in our consideration of Vinyl). Centring his discussion on Horse, Daviesargues that many of Warhol’s sound films foster ‘a performative dichotomy’ between ‘those who commandthe voice and those who do not’, ‘talkers’ versus ‘beauties’. In addition to its foregrounding of this tension,Davies explores the film’s generic status as a deconstructed Western, and the ways in which this particularform enabled Warhol and Tavel to play with language, voice and sound. Jean Wainwright’s essay on Warhol’sportrait film Bufferin centres on an interview conducted by the author with Gerard Malanga, the movie’s star.Together, Wainwright and Malanga discuss the film’s production context and methods, including the tacticsthat Warhol and Malanga both employed in attempts to undermine the other’s efforts. Malanga also reflectson the film from a contemporary perspective, and situates it in relation to other films by Warhol.

The contributions to the book by Gary Needham and by David Campbell and Mark Durden providesustained engagements with examples of Warhol’s cinema as he began to deploy it commercially. In hisessay on the largely unknown Bufferin Commercial, Gary Needham situates the film in relation to a key


(top) Flesh for Frankenstein (1973); (above) Blood for Dracula (1973)

definition. In a late interview, Warhol said, ‘our movies are like rushes. We haven’t really finished acompleted film. Everything is part of something else’ (Vogue, March 1973, p. 204). To the non-Warholviewer, many films – for example, Vinyl (1965) – would appear to just end when the final reel runs out,giving the impression that there was more to come in the film and that what we have seen is unfinished.This is ‘unfinished’ in the formal sense that there should be more to the situation or the story, but thisformal definition does not apply to Warhol’s film-making – which, one should note, was also withoutcredits. The end of the last reel is the end of the film, since almost all of Warhol’s movies were conceivedaround the reel as a particular unit of film-making and as an alternative strategy to editing. Claire Henryand the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum define the ‘unfinished’ film as one that Warhollost interest in, abandoning the material without completing it. Often these unfinished films were originallyconceived as something much more complex and ambitious, and tend to be characterised by extensivefootage, such as the several hours of material for Batman Dracula (1964).

9. Throughout the 1960s, many of the films available for double-screen projection were also available forsingle-screen projection. Some titles appear to have been conceived originally as single-screen projections,but have at a later point been shown in the double-screen format. The Film-Makers’ CooperativeCatalogues are instructive in these matters, indicating films which are either single, double, or both. It is atestament to Warhol’s ingenuity that some of his films can be shown in either single- or double-screenformat.

10. Sterling McIlhenny and Peter Ray, ‘Inside Andy Warhol’ (1966), in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be YourMirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 105.

11. Richard Ekstract, ‘Pop Goes the Videotape: An Underground Interview with Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith(ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 73.

12. Glenn O’Brien, ‘Interview: Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 244. 13. Leticia Kent, ‘Andy Warhol Movieman: “It’s harder to be your own script”’, Vogue, March 1970, n.p.14. Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

1997), p. 131.15. David E. James, ‘Amateurs in the Industry Town: Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol in Los Angeles’, Grey

Room, no. 12, Summer 2003, p. 86. James’s analysis of the film also includes a useful description of theevents and scenes in the film.

16. Ibid., p. 89.17. Thanks to Claire Henry for this information.18. Steve Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), p. 89.19. John Giorno, ‘Andy Warhol’s Movie Sleep’, in You Got to Burn to Shine (New York and London: High Risk

Books, 1994), p. 127.20. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 177.21. Giorno, Burn to Shine, p. 136.22. Callie Angell, ‘Sleep’, in Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 10.23. Joseph Gelmis, ‘Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 163. 24. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Penguin, 2007; first published

1980), p. 32.25. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 166.26. Email exchange with Claire Henry.27. J. Hoberman, ‘Bon Voyeur: Andy Warhol’s Silver Screen’, Village Voice, 17 May 1988, n.p.; Mekas quoted

in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 415.28. Mekas writes, ‘Andy Warhol for instance, is in the process of making the longest and simplest movie ever

made: an eight hours-long movie that shows nothing but a man sleeping. But this simple movie will pushAndy Warhol – and has pushed me, and a few others who saw it, some of it – further than we werebefore.’ Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, 19 September 1963, p. 17.

29. Bourdon, Warhol, p. 190.30. Village Voice, 16 January 1964, p. 13.31. John Giorno, ‘Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 21. 32. Village Voice, 13 February 1964, p. 12.33. Ruth Hirschman, ‘Pop Goes the Artist’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 45.34. Wolf writes that ‘the words “sort of” in the movie’s title appear in Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary, in

such passages as “what I think I wrote/Ms. sort of” and “be free and easy/and open sort of”’. Wolf, AndyWarhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 131.

35. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York and London: MarionBoyars, 1991; revised and updated third edition), p. 34.

I N TRODUCT I ON 41

tension in Warhol’s output, between his ‘artistic’ work and his ‘business’ art. Needham positions BufferinCommercial in relation to other commissioned Warhol films and also uses the movie to explore Warhol’s poseas a ‘bad’ or naïve film-maker. The first reel of Bufferin Commercial is without sound: whether or not this wasa mistake is unknown. Needham uses this ‘error’ to examine Warhol’s relationship to ‘mistakes’ across hisartistic career. Finally, Needham carefully unpacks the aesthetics of Bufferin Commercial, and positions thefilm in relation to particular stylistic tropes and devices that Warhol began to use widely in his cinema in 1966,including unmotivated zooms, tilts and pans; he characterises this as Warhol’s peripatetic mode. Needhamargues that Bufferin Commercial is a key title in the development of Warhol’s ongoing experiments withcinematic style, projection and commercialisation. In their conversation about The Chelsea Girls, DavidCampbell and Mark Durden adopt the roles of ‘A’ and ‘B’, possibly versions of the same characters thatappear in Warhol’s book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. They explore role-playing in Warhol’s mostcommercially successful film – in particular, the distinction between acting and ‘playing oneself’, and the waysin which these interact with conceptions of realism, naturalism and ‘the authentic’. Campbell and Durdensituate The Chelsea Girls in relation to forms of experimental theatre surfacing in New York in the mid-1960s,and explore the influence these may have had on Warhol. Through close engagement with its content, theyalso argue for the significance of the film’s depiction of a community, its deployment of the dual-projectionformat and its harnessing of ‘controlled distraction’ as a mode of perception.

The last two essays in Warhol in Ten Takes examine titles from Warhol’s later, more commercially oriented(and thus often critically disdained) period of film-making. Glyn Davis’s essay on Bike Boy – one of Warhol’s‘sexploitation’ movies – argues that one of the film’s main challenges to conventional cinema is its lack of fitwith recognised categories. Bike Boy may have been peddled as sexploitation, but it does not square withdominant understandings of the genre proposed by Eric Schaefer and Linda Williams. Might Warhol’s film bebetter framed as another type of exploitation film – the biker flick? After reading Bike Boy as an instance of thebiker exploitation cycle of the late 1960s and early 70s, Davis concludes by suggesting that the film mightbetter be understood as an instance of ‘paracinema’, as theorised by Jeffrey Sconce. Indeed, it is argued thatWarhol’s film output as a whole could be profitably explored as examples of ‘cult’ cinema; employing such aframework might enable valuable insights regarding production, distribution, exhibition and reception.

The final essay in the collection is Gavin Butt’s exploration of the Warhol/Morrissey film Women inRevolt, in which he engages at length with concepts of acting, performance and ‘superstardom’. Women inRevolt, a ‘comic melodrama on the women’s liberation movement’, features content that has been interpretedas reactionary (and which caused minor controversy at the time of the film’s making). However, Butt arguesthat the performances in the film, especially that of Candy Darling, blur distinctions between artifice andreality to such an extent that they serve to undo the narrative’s more conservative elements. Butt concludesthat Women in Revolt ‘allows us to glimpse, if not fully realise, the possibilities of an alternative cinema’ – ‘anaspirant cinema’. This conception, which could be applied to many of Warhol’s movies, is a fitting conclusionto this book, a volume which we hope offers up a provocative combination of sustained critical and theoreticalreflection, rich contextual information and detailed close scrutiny. The ‘Ten Takes’ collected in these pagesprovide ‘glimpses’ at Warhol’s ‘alternative cinema’, in ways that both celebrate this body of work, andrecognise the significant amount of future research, interrogation and exploration that remains to be done.

Notes

1. Warhol withdrew his films in the early 1970s. However, numerous prints of the films were still in some formof circulation, as they belonged to particular institutions or individuals like Ondine and Gerard Malanga. On 26 April 1988 in New York, Warhol’s films re-entered ‘official’ circulation through the MoMA/Whitneyrestoration prints; shortly thereafter, in September 1989, some of those films (My Hustler [1965], BeautyNo. 2 [1965] and The Chelsea Girls [1966]) were shown on British television’s Channel Four.

2. Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 8.3. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Introduction’, October 132, Spring 2010, pp. 3–4.4. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (New York: Princeton University Press,

1989), p. 62.5. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 153.6. J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2012).7. Callie Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, in Angell et al., The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA: The

Andy Warhol Museum; New York: Distributed Art Publishers; Stuttgart: Cantz Publishers, 1994), p. 122.8. Both Callie Angell and Claire Henry, those mostly closely involved with the original film materials, refer to

a number of films as being unfinished. The concept of the ‘unfinished film’ needs some clarification and


75. In addition to Jack Smith in the starring role, the film also includes Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Tally Brown, Beverly Grant, Ivy Nicholson, Robert Heide, Dorothy Dean, Sally Kirkland, John D. McDermott, Mario Montez, Rufus Collins, Phillip Fagan, Henry Geldzahler and Ron Link.

76. Callie Angell cited in Amy Taubin, ‘Oh Factory!’, Village Voice, 5 April 1994, p. 62.77. Mekas quoted in Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, p. 330.78. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:

Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 113–38.79. Reva Wolf, ‘Collaboration as Social Exchange’, Art Journal, vol. 52 no. 4, Winter 1993, p. 59.80. Ibid.81. Banes, Greenwich Village 1963.82. Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger, 1970).83. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, p. 204.84. Geldzahler interview from Other Scenes, Spring 1971, n.p.85. Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 114.86. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Art

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 150.87. A good number of these are reproduced in Andy Warhol: Strange World Drawings 1948–1959

(New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2008). 88. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 36.89. Ibid., p. 37.90. This is explored in detail in Banes, Greenwich Village 1963.91. Paul Morrissey cited in Robert S. Levinson, ‘However Measured or Far Away: Waiting for Andy Waiting for

Andy Waiting’ (New York: Film Study Archives Centre, MoMA; original source unknown), p. 32.92. Douglas Crimp, ‘The Risk of Coming Together: Ronald Tavel’s Screenplays for Andy Warhol’s Films’,

in John C. Welchman (ed.), The Aesthetics of Risk (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2008), p. 114. 93. Bourdon, Warhol, p. 140.94. O’Brien, ‘Interview: Andy Warhol’, reprinted in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 247.95. Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995 [1969]), p. 27.96. Crimp, ‘Risk of Coming Together’, p. 113.97. Ibid.98. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 165.99. Thanks to Andrew Biswell of the Anthony Burgess Foundation for confirmation of this point.100.Tavel’s script for Vinyl can be accessed from <http://www.ronaldtavel.com/work.html>.101. Ibid., p. 2.102.Battcock, ‘Four Films by Andy Warhol’, p. 46.103.Tavel cited in Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 501. An interesting anecdote: having recently watched the

film at the event ‘Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange’ (Manchester, June 2012), all the audience wanted totalk about after the screening was Edie Sedgwick’s magnetic presence. She usurped any potentialdiscussion of the film as an adaptation of the book.

104.Ibid.105.Bourdon, ‘Warhol as Filmmaker’, p. 48.106.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 63.107. This list of cinemas is based on a survey of the advertising copy from all of the issues of Village Voice

published in 1967.108.Stéphane Aquin (ed.), Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work (London and New York:

Prestel, 2008), p. 140.109.Ibid.110. Branden W. Joseph, ‘“My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, Grey Room, no. 8,

Summer 2002, p. 81.111. Ibid.112. Ibid., pp. 87–8.113. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,

1967), p. 227.114. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 41.115. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (New York: Macmillan,

1972), p. 55. Jackie Hatfield provides a more recent definition: ‘Not without ambiguities, expanded cinemaas a term generally describes synaesthetic cinematic spectacle (spectacle meaning exhibition, rather thansimply an issue of projection or scale), whereby the notions of conventional filmic language (for example,

I N TRODUCT I ON 43

36. Callie Angell, ‘Empire’, in Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures (Berlin: KW Institute forContemporary Art, 2004), p. 29.

37. David Bourdon, ‘Warhol as Filmmaker’, Art in America, vol. 59 no. 3, May–June 1971, p. 48.38. Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 284–7.39. Angell, ‘Empire’, pp. 29–30.40. Gregory Battcock, ‘Four Films by Andy Warhol’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory

(London: BFI, 1989), p. 44.41. Koch, Stargazer, p. 43.42. Angell, ‘Empire’, pp. 28–9.43. Warhol quoted in Koch, Stargazer, p. 19.44. Koch, Stargazer, p. 19.45. Battcock, ‘Four Films’, pp. 44, 42.46. Brigitte Weingart, ‘“That Screen Magnetism”: Warhol’s Glamour’, October 132, Spring 2010, p. 50.47. Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera, p. 34.48. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002; third edition), p. 348.49. Ibid., p. 349.50. Ibid., pp. 351–2.51. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 165, 174.52. Ibid., p. 166.53. Village Voice, 3 June 1965, p. 15.54. Douglas Sefton, ‘The Underground Movie: An Avant-Garden of Eden’, Daily News, 6 August 1965, p. 34;

‘The Chelsea Girls’, Newsweek, 14 November 1966, n.p.55. Jack Kroll, ‘Up from the Underground’, Newsweek, 13 February 1967, n.p.56. Amos Vogel, ‘Thirteen Confusions’, Evergreen Review, June 1967, reprinted in Gregory Battcock,

The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton and Co., 1967), pp. 124–38.57. For a longer account of the tensions between Mekas and Vogel, see David Curtis, ‘A Tale of Two Co-ops’,

in David E. James (ed.), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 255–65.

58. Markopoulos quoted in Watson, Factory Made, p. 178.59. Village Voice, 27 August 1964, n.p.60. For an account of these objects and their significance, see Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘Facing Taylor Mead’s

Ass’, Little Joe, no. 2, 2011, pp. 68–77; reprinted in this volume.61. ‘The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group’, Film Culture, no. 22–3, Summer 1961, n.p.62. Gregory Battcock, ‘Introduction’, in Battcock (ed.), New American Cinema, p. 12.63. Ken Kelman, ‘Anticipations of the Light’, in Battcock (ed.), New American Cinema, p. 24.64. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham,

NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 6.65. Ron Tavel, ‘The Banana Diary: The Story of Andy Warhol’s Harlot’, in O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol Film

Factory, p. 76.66. ‘Charles Henri Ford and Ira Cohen Discuss the Passing of the Surreal Baton to Gerard Malanga’, Archives

Malanga, vol. 2 (Baltimore, MD: The Waverly Press, 2011), p. 20. Ira Cohen thinks that Malanga is the starof Blow Job, only to be corrected by Charles Henri Ford, who says ‘It’s not Gerard’s face. It’s somebodyelse getting a blow job by Willard Maas.’

67. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 31.68. Jonas Mekas interviewed in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 415.69. This title is noted by Frei and Printz as the reel from the film that includes the crate of silver ‘you’re in’

Coca-Cola bottles in the background. George Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue RaisonnéVolume 2: Paintings and Sculpture 1964–1969 (London: Phaidon, 2004), p. 281.

70. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1(New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 276.

71. Email conversation with Claire Henry.72. Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, p. 166.73. These two Screen Tests were included in a short compilation with the Nancy Fish Screen Test, the

assemblage tellingly identified on the tape lid as Dracula/3 Most. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 257.74. In Vinyl, Edie Sedgwick sits to the right of the frame, while the all-male S&M occurs on the left of the

frame and in the quasi-visible background: both Baby Jane Holzer and Edie feign disinterest in theoutrageous gay spectacle.


that put him at the centre of film-making as a commercial enterprise rather than as an artistic practice. A good deal of the ‘business rhetoric’ of the 1970s seems to be based on expunging large portions of the‘1960s Warhol’ from both memory and visibility including most of, if not all, the films. Morrissey told VictorBockris that he wanted the early films out of circulation, and this would seem to be an attempt to ‘manage’the Warhol image through cleansing it of its more druggy, queer, radical past (Bockris, Andy Warhol, p. 340).This also had a detrimental effect on the college film-rental circuit, where Warhol’s earlier films were stillpopular and in circulation and in which Gerard Malanga was actively involved. With his ‘return to painting’ inthe early 1970s, and the success of a series of international exhibitions and retrospectives, it was no doubton the advice of his lawyers and accountants that Warhol muted the visibility of his early film-making career– which many had already thought was a wasted diversion in the first place.

Another reason that might be proposed for the withdrawal of the films relates to the financialsuccess of some of them, and the knowledge that Warhol was a wealthy artist whose work wasincreasing in value. A small number of his collaborators and actors from the film-making period suedWarhol for monies owed, among them Paul America, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov (actually, her mother)and Ronald Tavel (who sued Warhol in 1971 in an attempt to recover money from his work on TheChelsea Girls). It may have been easier, financially and emotionally, for Warhol to withdraw his films ratherthan be seen to be still profiting from them and to worry who would be the next superstar to claim theirdues from the empire. Financial issues around rentals and movie grosses for Flesh for Frankenstein arealso cited as one of the nails in the coffin for Warhol’s film-making in the 1970s. This might not haveresulted in the direct withdrawal of the 1960s films, but it certainly tarnished potential commercialventures for Andy Warhol Films Inc. Apparently, Andy Warhol Enterprises was owed millions of dollars byItalian producer Carlo Ponti for Frankenstein, yet none was ever forthcoming. Meanwhile, Blood forDracula became embroiled in a scandal through the dodgy US distributor’s involvement with the Mafia;the film was ‘unceremoniously dumped’ (Bockris, Andy Warhol, p. 373).

152.Koch, Stargazer, p. 150.153.‘Margheriti: The Wild Wild Interview’, Video Watchdog, no. 28, 1995, p. 57.154.Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 140.155.Ibid., pp. 139–40.156.Graig Uhlin, ‘TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol’, Cinema Journal, vol. 49 no. 3, Spring 2010, pp. 1–23.157. Greg Pierce, ‘On Videos 1965–1975’, in Eva Meyer-Hermann (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in

2 Hours 56 Minutes (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2008), pp. 02:10:00–02:13:00.158.Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms: TV-Scape’, in Meyer-Hermann (ed.), Andy Warhol:

A Guide to 706 Items, pp. 02:16:00–02:17:00.

I N TRODUCT I ON 45

dramaturgy, narrative, structure, technology) are either extended or interrogated outside the single-screenspace.’ Jackie Hatfield, ‘Expanded Cinema – Proto, Post-Photo’, in Hatfield (ed.), Experimental Film andVideo: An Anthology (Eastleigh, Hants.: J. Libbey, 2006), p. 237.

116. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, p. 103.117. Callie Angell, ‘Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space’, Millennium Film Journal,

no. 38, Spring 2002, p. 24. Greg Pierce of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has expressed somereservations in relation to identifying Outer and Inner Space as Warhol’s first double-projection work;personal communication with the authors, September 2012.

118. J. Hoberman, ‘Nobody’s Land: Inside Outer and Inner Space’, in From Stills to Motion and Back Again:Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space (Vancouver: Presentation HouseGallery, 2003), p. 22.

119. Angell, ‘Doubling the Screen’, p. 29.120.Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (London: Phoenix, 2003), p. 125.121. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, pp. 317–18.122.Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 145, n. 52. Since making this claim in 1994, handwritten notes on the

reels and projection of **** have subsequently been found in Warhol’s personal archive.123.On Warhol’s polymorphous perversity, see Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, pp. 117–19.124.Marc Siegel, ‘Doing It for Andy’, Art Journal, vol. 61 no. 1, Spring 2003, p. 7.125.Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction’, in Doyle, Flatley and Muñoz

(eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2.126.Simon Watney, ‘Queer Andy’, in Doyle et al. (eds), Pop Out, p. 20.127. Doyle et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 4.128.Giorno, Burn to Shine, pp. 132–3.129.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 14.130.Ibid., p. 15.131. Ibid., pp. 279–80.132.Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World (Durham, NC, and

London: Duke University Press, 2005); Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA:Temple University Press, 2003); Meyer, Outlaw Representation.

133.Dyer, Now You See It, p. 145.134.Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1984).135.Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 160–1.136.Thomas Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, in Doyle et al. (eds), Pop Out, p. 54.137. Dyer, Now You See It, p. 153.138.R. Bruce Brasell, ‘My Hustler: Gay Spectatorship as Cruising’, Wide Angle, vol. 14 no. 2, April 1992, pp. 54–64.139.Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, pp. 61–2.140.Ibid., p. 62.141. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, pp. 95–158, especially pp. 155–6.142.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, pp. 278–9.143.Ibid., p. 302.144.There is at least one undocumented and unreleased Warhol/Morrissey film from the Flesh era called

Brass Bed (1969).145.Morrissey cited in Derek Hill, ‘Andy Warhol as a Filmmaker’, Studio International, vol. 181 no. 936,

February 1971, p. 54.146.<http://www.paulmorrissey.org/film.html>. Accessed 28 June 2012.147. Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3.148.Morrissey, quoted in Yacowar, Paul Morrissey, p. 4.149.Cited in Erik La Prade, ‘Paul Morrissey on the Lower East Side’, in Clayton Patterson (ed.), Captured:

A Film and Video History of the Lower East Side (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 38.150.Douglas Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 46–67.151. There are a number of accounts which attempt to explain why Warhol’s films were withdrawn from

circulation. One reason is related to business practices and the consolidation of corporate identity. As Vincent Freemont says, ‘Every time Andy made a film, he started a new production company – therewas Factory Films, Lonesome Cowboys Inc., Score Movies, et cetera. Sometime in or around 1973 or 1974with the advice of our accountants and lawyers, it was decided to dissolve all of these little companies andput all of Andy’s business under the umbrella of Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc.’ (‘Interview with VincentFreemont’, in Sarah Urist Green and Alison Unruh [eds], Andy Warhol Enterprises [Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz,2010], p. 150.) Paul Morrissey’s account aligns himself with the corporate identity and business practices


warhol in 10 takes [introduction with glyn davis] 2013

Documents