TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Avant-garde/Experimental, Short Film, Documentary, Drama, Visual Arts, Trash Film, Gay & Lesbian Films
Key Collaborators: Edie Sedgwick (Character Actress), Ronald Tavel (Screenwriter), Gerard Malanga (Character Actor), Ondine (Character Actor), Rufus Collins (Leading Actor), Brigid Berlin (Leading Actress), John Giorno (Leading Character Actor), Taylor Mead (Leading Character Actor), Nico (Character Actress), Billy Name (Leading Character Actor), Salvador Dali (Leading Character Actor), Viva (Leading Character Actress)

"Although he did not 'direct' in the conventional sense, from 1963 to 1967 he produced some fifty films, mostly in collaboration with Paul Morrissey, a member of his 'Factory'. Warhol employed a passive, mechanical aesthetic of simply turning on the camera to record what was in front of it. The shortest of these films (Mario Banana, 1964) was four minutes in length and the longest (Four Stars, 1967) twenty-five hours. Warhol's films generally featured the antics of members of his Factory - friends, artists, junkies, transvestites and exhibitionists - who became underground celebrities, epitomizing his ideal of fifteen minutes' fame for everyone." - The Movie Book, 1999

"Underground film-maker, and the leading exhibitionist of this branch of the cinema. A fashion illustrator and 'pop' artist, Warhol took to film-making only in 1963. He immediately attracted widespread attention with his three-hour Sleep (1963), made up of one-reel segments recording a man sleeping… Not all his films are directed by himself; he is in effect the master-supervisor of a team of film-makers, notably Paul Morrissey on whose work he stamps his own very individual style and treatment." - The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972

"Most widely publicized of all the underground film-makers who rose to prominence during the Sixties… As a director he is best known for a minimalist technique which involves positioning the camera and letting it run on, with occasional slight camera movements, but allowing the actors to develop and improvize a performance unbroken by subsequent cuts or editing. At its most tedious this method produced such numbing and unwatchable minimalist works as Sleep and Empire, running six or eight hours. But his later short pictures featured his own troupe of camp and outrageous 'superstars' including Edie Sedgwick, Mario Montez and Viva, some of them quite talented and witty in from of the camera." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983

"Andy Warhol was not only the twentieth century’s most “famous” exponent of Pop art but, “a post-modern Renaissance man”: a commercial illustrator, a writer, a photographer, a sculptor, a magazine editor, a television producer, an exhibition curator, and one of the most important and provocative filmmakers of the New American Cinema group of the early 1960s. The influence of Warhol’s filmmaking can be found in both the Hollywood mainstream film, which took from his work a “gritty street-life realism, sexual explicitness, and on-the-edge performances,” and in experimental film, which “reworked his long-take, fixed-camera aesthetic into what came to be known as structural film.”" - Constantine Verevis (Senses of Cinema, 2002)

"Given Warhol’s penchant for the automatic and mass-produced, his movement from sculpture, canvas, and silkscreen into cinema seemed logical; and his films were as passive, as intentionally 'empty', as significant of the artist’s absence as his previous work or as the image he projected of himself... Despite Warhol’s cultivated image as the 'tycoon of passivity,' his films display a cool but very dry wit. Blow Job, for example, consisted of thirty minutes of a closeup of the expressionless face of a man being fellated outside the frame—a coyly humorous presentation of a forbidden act in an image perversely composed as a denial of pleasure (for the actor and the audience)." - Ed Lowry (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"Warhol is as profoundly important a filmmaker as he is a Pop artist. His place in film history, however, needs a very careful, exact description. Warhol is not a master filmmaker – not artful in any deliberated sense. He really did just 'turn the camera on and walk away' quite often and, in this sense, some of his films are indeed pure accidents. Yet Warhol, although he may have had only a dim sense of it himself, discovered something in cinema – or rather, he unleashed it." - Adrian Martin (Film Critic: Adrian Martin, 1991)

"Warhol's movies reach the parts other films don't wish to. Why should Hollywood have all the stars? Warhol creates his own 'superstars', Viva, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Joe Dallesandro. Drag-queens, male and female hustlers who get together and improvise their own uncensored Hollywood fantasies in the films called Blow Job (1964), Harlot (1964), My Hustler (1965), and Blue Movie (1968). Chelsea Girls (1966) has two screens on which to watch them perform and Lonesome Cowboys (1968) shows what Hawks's male heroes might have got up to with each other had they been allowed to." - Ronald Bergan (A-Z of Movie Directors, 1983)

"Warhol’s films display a strange mixture of the famous and the not so famous. In yet another parallel to his works as a painter/printmaker, Warhol constantly challenges the distinctions between high and low art, high and low life, and high and low value systems. This leveling effect, applied to art, life, sex, fame, celebrity, and consumer society, contributes to the shape-shifting identity of Warhol’s personality and art." - National Gallery of Art

"I discovered Warhol seven years ago and became obsessed with his filmmaking. His films are complex, his filmography is rich and unknown. I had to see [his films] pirated because it was the only access I had to his work." - Radu Jude, 2024

"Our movies may have looked like home movies, but then our home wasn't like anybody else's." - Andy Warhol