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Andy Warhol’s outer and inner space
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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"Andy Warhol and the Factory: Selected Works"
At the Harvard Film Archive February 8 through 28.
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Among filmmakers whose work is more heard about than seen, Andy Warhol is the ultimate. Six hours of a man sleeping, eight hours of the Empire State Building — these notions of Warholian cinema are known to many, but almost no one has seen Sleep (1963) or Empire (1964), not even for a few seconds. As a convenient symbol for extremes of boredom, duration, and directorial non-intervention, Warhol is more a placeholder in film history than a presence within it. He’s an over-familiar allusion, a wild card, a blank screen on which anyone who wants to can project anything; and it’s assumed that seeing any of his films would add nothing to hearing it described, except a lot of time. The Harvard Film Archive’s Warhol retrospective offers a chance to test that assumption. The actual screening of these rumored-about films will, as always, reveal them as elegant, witty, and gorgeous works, capable of exerting a fascination that’s unique in cinema and that has to be experienced. Such as Kiss (1963; 54 minutes; February 14 at 9 p.m.), a film of surprising serenity and tenderness. Through a series of long takes of couples kissing, Kiss unfolds many riches: variations in rhythm; different qualities of light; the beauty of the random patterns of light that obliterate each unedited roll of film at its run-out. Like any Warhol movie, Kiss is a spiraling whirl of contradictions. The participants’ absorption in each other makes the viewer irrelevant; but the film continually alludes to the mystery of who is watching and why. Although the actors are doing what we watch movie stars do all the time, the absence of stars here allows you to concentrate on the real properties of the image (the texture of a sweater, the position of a hand) and undirected revelations of behavior (several actors break into spontaneous smiles of nervousness and gratitude). Yet his subjects’ lack of star quality is never an issue for Warhol, who might say (and, I think, did) that the people become stars by being in his movie. If Kiss is, with Eat (1963; 45 minutes; to be shown on the same program) and Sleep (not included in this series), one of Warhol’s Songs of Innocence, the oppressive Blow Job (1963; 35 minutes; February 13 at 7 p.m.) is the first of his Songs of Experience. This work is ostensibly about the title act, but we never see the service or the provider, only the recipient (a young man), and at that only his face and parts of his upper body. The intense lighting yields an image as æstheticized as Josef von Sternberg’s famous shot of Marlene Dietrich suddenly lit from above in Shanghai Express. Like Sternberg’s films, Blow Job is a meditation on the solitude of the performer, a solitude revealed most poignantly at the moment of the actor’s apparent climax. Starting in late 1964, Warhol added sound to his cinema and collaborated with writer Ronald Tavel on a series of long-take experimental narratives that, though usually received as perverse and campy artifacts of the underground scene of the era, repay serious attention as much as they repel it. Vinyl (1965; 66 minutes; on the same program with Blow Job), an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, is one of the most direct films about violence ever made, superior in every respect to Stanley Kubrick’s version. Outer and Inner Space (1965; 33 minutes; February 28 at 7 p.m.) is an excellent Warhol title, suggesting the shifting frames of reference in which his films involve the audience. That two-projector work anticipates Warhol’s masterpiece, The Chelsea Girls (1966; 210 minutes; February 27 at 7 p.m.). Each segment of the film starts from a simple premise, usually about control. Under pressure of the 30-minute take, actor and role diverge. Heightening the indeterminacy of the viewing experience, the split screen also heightens the paranoid suspicion of a concealed design. Warhol has been called a moralist, and the moral of The Chelsea Girls is that there is no escape, not through drugs, sex, or playacting. No escape from what? From the present, from being looked at. The cool protagonists of The Chelsea Girls use all their ingenuity to make the camera’s presence a pretext to pose and hide, but truth, with duration and off-screen space as its allies, finds them and forces them to try something else. The Chelsea Girls reinvents cinema as an endless chase sequence.
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