When Andy Warhol decided to retire from fine art to concentrate on movies it was a major endorsement that increased awareness of the avant-garde film. He recreated the history of cinema from the kiss through the silents to the talkies before developing his own commercial features. By the time of Lupe he had formed his own style that now owed little to his early influences like Jack Smith and Ron Rice. Edie Sedgwick stars in this beautiful film which will be shown here in a double screen format. Marie Menken’s film is a portrait of Warhol in his studio, and her husband the poet Willard Maas shot the silver balloon show at Leo Castelli’s gallery. Super-Artist is a long lost documentary of the Warhol Factory shot in 1965. Andy made Screen Tests for inclusion in Match Girl – a neglected but beautiful work made in the Factory by Andrew Meyer. Taylor Mead’s fast paced film diary includes on location footage from the unreleased San Diego Surf.
AROUND THE FACTORY
Sunday 25 October 1998, at 8:45pm
London Barbican Cinema
Andy Warhol’s interest in experimental film developed in the early 1960s when he began to attend screenings organised by Jonas Mekas. There he saw works by Jack Smith and Ron Rice that deeply influenced his approach to cinema. From 1963-68 at the Warhol Factory the entire history of cinema was recreated and rewritten by a considerable cast of Superstars and assistants. It’s a popular misconception that The Factory was simply a drop-in centre for drop-outs and dope fiends, but this view does not take in to account the enormous number of creative people that worked with and around Andy Warhol in the sixties – an incredibly artistic crowd which at various times included The Velvet Underground, Piero Heliczer, Angus MacLise, Ronald Tavel, Billy Name and many others.
Marie Menken and Willard Maas were two of the people responsible for Warhol’s move towards cinema. It was through Marie, Willard and the poet Charles Henri Ford that Andy was introduced to Gerard Malanga, who was to become his assistant during the intensely productive mid-1960s period. Marie also starred in Warhol’s films The Life Of Juanita Castro (1965) and The Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1965 she made a stop motion portrait of Warhol at work in the Factory and her husband Willard Maas documented the silver clouds exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery one year later.
ANDY WARHOL
Marie Menken, USA, 1965, 16mm, colour, silent, 22 min
“Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them “scholarly drunks”) and were involved with all the modern poets. Marie was one of the first to do a film with stop-time. She filmed lots of movies, some with Willard, and she even did one on a day in my life”. (Andy Warhol on Willard Maas and Marie Menken in Popism – The Warhol Sixties, 1980)
ANDY WARHOL’S SILVER FLOTATIONS
Willard Maas, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
“The buoyant clouds were a striking sight as they grazed aimlessly about the room, clustering in mid-air just below the ceiling. Susceptible to air currents, changes in temperature, and static electricity, they endlessly rearranged themselves. Although their movements were mainly dictated by air currents or passersby, they often appeared to express behavioural traits of their own. It was a novel experience to be confronted by floating forms that were soft and resilient and seemed to be both utterly passive and totally free.” (Description of the silver clouds show by David Bourdon in his book on Warhol, 1989)
The early silent films like Kiss (1963-64) and Empire (1964) gained the respect of the film community and in 1965 Andy Warhol announced his “retirement” from painting in order concentrate on movies. By this time he had progressed to incorporate either improvised soundtracks or scripted scenarios by Ronald Tavel and his output was incredibly prolific. Some films such as the Edie Sedgwick portrait Outer And Inner Space (1965) and the legendary The Chelsea Girls were conceived as dual screen projections, but most of the double reel features from this period were sometimes presented in this manner, usually at performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Hedy (variously known as The Most Beautiful Woman In The World, The Shoplifter or The Fourteen Year Old Girl) features a large cast including Mario Montez, Jack Smith, Mary Woronov and Ingrid Superstar and has an original score by John Cale and Lou Reed. After the success of The Chelsea Girls, Warhol moved towards a more traditional narrative style and following initial commercial experiments like I, A Man and Nude Restaurant in 1967 he handed over to Paul Morrissey who directed Factory Films until production gradually wound down during the 1970s.
HEDY
Andy Warhol, USA, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 33 min (double screen)
“Andy was definitely behind the camera in Hedy, and it’s what I think makes it one of the outstanding films that we did together. Because finally the master took over, and we could see his eye behind the camera. This was the second moving camera film … and I hated it when I first saw it because it came very close to destroying my script, the way he moved the camera, but I loved it for what he did. Because I’d never seen that sort of thing before: As the action would move toward its most dramatic, move toward its point, the camera eye would become bored with the action, with the story, with the problem of the star, kleptomania and so forth, and would begin to explore the ceiling.” (Ronald Tavel talking to Stephen Koch in the book Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World And His Films, 1973)
Andrew Meyer made a handful of outstanding poetic films including Shades And Drumbeats (1964) An Early Clue To The New Direction (1966) and a full length feature called The Sky Pirate (1969) before going on to direct several movies for Roger Corman in the 1970s. Match Girl depicts the fantasy experiences of an aspiring young actress in a loose interpretation of the fairytale Poor Little Match Girl. It offers vital insights into the Factory and boasts two original Screen Tests shot by Warhol for inclusion in the film.
MATCH GIRL
Andrew Meyer, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 26 min
“Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe are contrasted with the haunting poetry of Hans Christian Anderson in this jet age fairy tale of a lonely young model (Vivian Kurz) in the pop milieu of New York. The colours are exquisite, the mood is melancholy detached, the imagery evocative and lush … there’s a metaphysical gloom that pervades the film, but Meyer manages to transform it into a flawless portrait of the ‘cool’ aesthetic.” (Gene Youngblood on Match Girl in the Los Angeles Free Press, late-1960s)
Super-Artist is a long lost documentary on Warhol that was compiled by Bruce Torbet, a cameraman who usually worked on commercials and was not part of the underground scene. Most of the footage was shot in the Factory in 1965 after Torbet’s partner Juan Drago suggested they should ”just walk in and see what happens”. It is a delightful film edited in a playful Pop style which brilliantly captures the excitement and fun of the Silver Factory period. Torbet went on to work on several low budget feature films including Greaser’s Palace (Robert Downey, 1972) and Basket Case (Frank Henenlotter, 1981).
SUPER-ARTIST ANDY WARHOL
Bruce Torbet, USA, 1967, 16mm on video, colour, sound, 21 min
“A fascinating look into the artist, his image, his point of view, his environment. With Henry Geldzahler, Edie Sedgwick and a large supporting cast. Segments of: commercials matched against Warhol making a movie, children romping in the Castelli Gallery amid Andy’s floating plastic pillows, corroded, colour-dyed scenes of Andy at work, The Velvet Underground and a thousand film clips chopped up into an eye-popping-picture-sound-chef’s salad.” (Bruce Torbet, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)
Having performed in legendary films by Ron Rice, Gregory Markopoulos and Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead is well known as one of the underground’s greatest stars. He is also respected for his unique diary films which are highly praised as among the earliest in the single frame style. He made his home movies with a cheap pawn shop camera and used single, double, sometimes even triple frame bursts to conserve film stock which was already becoming expensive in the late-1960s. NYC to San Diego includes footage from the shoot of Warhol’s unreleased San Diego Surf (1968) and features Viva, Joe Dallesandro, Eric Emerson and Paul Morrissey.
HOME MOVIES: NYC TO SAN DIEGO
Taylor Mead, USA, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound-on-tape, 19 min
“The film flickers through a millennium of culture as it would appear to a tourist. It is an intense film, yet there is an incredible wealth of information surprisingly accessible. Aside from the exciting experience itself, the breakneck history lesson is a reminder that the mind can move in lightning steps: The plodding way information is typically presented is an insult to mental capability.” (Bartlett Naylor on Taylor Mead’s Home Movies, 1982)
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