Two Andy Warhol films I just got

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I consider myself lucky to have found and bought two of the films Andy Warhol directed. They are in NTSC Region All format so they will play on my DVD player. Now these are not the productions that Paul Morrisey or Jed Johnson directed after Warhol quit directing. These are the real thing. Let me tell you about them.

The first is called Vinyl. It is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. It runs 63 minutes in black and white. Gerard Malanga (who was a real hunk at the time) plays Victor (the Alex role). We see a scene in which he and Ondine rough up a guy who is then tortured for the rest of the movie. We see Victor tormented by Tosh Carilllo (also a real hunk) who plays the doctor intent on reforming Victor. I've attached a still that shows Gerard Malanga seated wearing a torn tee-shirt, Tosh Carillo standing over him, and Edie Sedgewick standing around looking pretty.

The second film is called The Velvet Underground and Nico. It allows the camera to play over and across the band. The band is playing a long droning riff (similar to the ending of "Sister Ray") for about fifty minutes. Then the police come in and shut it down. Then we see the band and some of their associates wandering around smoking cigarettes and drinking booze for another fifteen minutes or so. In the last part we get to see Gerard Melanga, Billy Name, Andy Warhol, and a few other folk. Oh, and Nico's baby boy Ari sits in front of the band. It's kind of neat.

If you haven't seen any Warhol films, here are two shorts, Mario Banana 1 and Mario Banana 2, in their entirety. These are silent.



If you've seen these or other of the films that Warhol directed, tell me what you think. Or for that matter, what do you think of the Mario Montez shorts?

 

[crakker_jakk]

i nico

 

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i nico

Yes, Nico is terrific. The Velvet Underground and Nico starts with a long, long close-up of Nico. She's beating a tambourine with a maraca. Unfortunately the band doesn't sing in this film so we don't get to hear her breathtaking voice. The film itself is 64 minutes filmed in one long take, no cuts, no edits. It's entirely different from any concert movie I've ever seen--probably different from any other concert film that has ever been made.

Here is a picture of the band. Back row from left to right are Sterling Morrison, Nico, Maureen Tucker, and John Cale. In the front is Lou Reed.

 

[construct]

Oh, I found a clip from each of these films. The first clip is a dance number from Vinyl. Gerard Malanga is dancing in the foreground.



The second clip is the first eight minutes or so of The Velvet Underground and Nico. You'll notice Nico as the blonde at the very beginning. Ari is sitting on the floor in front of her. Lou Reed is sitting playing guitar on the left. Sterling Morrison is playing guitar behind him. Maureen Tucker is in the back right on drums. John Cale is front right on viola. Take a look.

Well, maybe I'd better not show that clip since Ari is in it. It's on YouTube as a Velvet Underground Live Jam.

 

[Jayden]

You must see Andy Warhols Bad. So funny, a really dark humor movie.[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwQJdHLlSdk[/ame]

 

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You must see Andy Warhols Bad. So funny, a really dark humor movie.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwQJdHLlSdk

Indeed it is. It's right up there with John Water's Female Trouble. But it's only available in a really crappy transfer in academy ratio although it was released in widescreen. Perry King's performance is terrific, especially the scene where he was supposed to kill that autistic preschooler. He slings him down the hall like a bowling ball and crashes him into a door.

But my favorite scene in Bad is the one where the mother was supposed to have killed her toddler, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. So she hired a hit-woman. Then her husband called to make sure she did it, and she got so mad at him that she through the baby out the window. We see him falling through the air and splattering on the sidewalk below splashing blood all over a pedestrian. Then in the backgound we see a mother shaking her finger at her eight-year-old son and saying, "That's what I'm going to do to you if you don't behave!"

I think Bad may have been the last movie Warhol produced. It was the only film directed by Jed Johnson.

 

[ashonfire]

Aw, I want that Velvets and Nico one!

 

[Jayden]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90TK9NgUA4[/ame]

 

[construct]

Nice.

I haven't seen any of the Warhol films but that's definitely an interesting clip. In that 3 minute context I'd much rather focus on Edie Sedgwick than Gerard Malanga. If I could just push him out of the shot....

Love the laughing man.

The laughing man is J.D. McDermott. He is the cop who later arrests Gerard (i.e. Victor), and ties him up in the chair that you see him sitting in. You can see him tied to the chair in the still that I attached above.

Edie is in most of the movie sitting over on the right smoking cigarettes and drinking out of plastic cup. At the end she gets up and dances (to a different song). The film is in two (mostly) stationary shots and Edie is essentially an extra. I think she just happened to be there when the film was being shot, and Andy stuck her in the movie for variety.

During that dance number, you can see Tosh Carillo in his white tee-shirt in the background. He's torturing the guy that Gerard and Ondine roughed up at the beginning of the movie. They tear his shirt off, put a plastic bag over his head, beat him with a belt which they also use to choke him, and drip candle wax on him. That's all in the background while the rest of the movie is playing out in the foreground. There's always something new to find in the frame.

It's an odd little movie. There was absolutely no rehearsal, and it was shot in one afternoon. Ronald Tavel wrote the screenplay, but I'm not sure that they knew much of their lines. The story is that Andy took Gerard out partying the night before the shoot so that his performance would look even less prepared than it would have otherwise.

 

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The woman in that second clip from Bad is Brigid Berlin, isn't it? You know, she went on to work for Interview magazine for decades. She may still be there sitting at the front desk knitting and not answering the phone.

Gerard Malanga is still around, too. He has kept up his poetry. And Billy Name has turned out to be a decent photographer as well. It's amazing which ones have survived.

Unfortunately Jed Johnson, who had made a very nice career in interior design, was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.

 

[gsdx]

I read about Warhol's movie Blow Job years ago and forgot all about it. This thread reminded me of it and I was surprised to find this edited version on YouTube. Here's a bit about the movie:

Andy Warhol: Blow Job
Peter Gidal
Art by Andy Warhol

In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of expression on the actor's face: we see only his head and shoulders, rigidly framed so that all offscreen space has to be imagined, or avoided. Sometimes the young actor looks bored, sometimes as if he is thinking, sometimes as if he is aware of the camera, sometimes as if he is not. Like the protagonists of other Warhol films, he is apparently left to his own devices.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11427

The young man getting the blowjob is DeVerne Bookwalter. (Andy sure knew how to pick 'em!!)

 

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Aw, I want that Velvets and Nico one!

Actually both films come in a two-disk case. Perhaps there is one on Amazon with one of their cooperating dealers. Be sure it's NTSC if you're in the States. The PAL version is more readily available, but it won't play right on most American DVD players.

 

[LiquidSky]

construct: you should purchase the new DVD 13 Most Beautiful. It is 13 of Andy's screen tests set to original music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (they used to be in the band Luna).

The 13 screen tests are: Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Billy Name, Nico, Lou Reed, Richard Rheem, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Waronov.

 

[construct]

construct: you should purchase the new DVD 13 Most Beautiful. It is 13 of Andy's screen tests set to original music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (they used to be in the band Luna).

The 13 screen tests are: Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Billy Name, Nico, Lou Reed, Richard Rheem, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Waronov.

In my opinion, the screen tests occupy an odd place at the margin of Warhol's work with film. They were apparently used and reused in various contexts and in various arrangements. There are about 500 of these little pieces of film of about three minutes each that are commonly called "screen tests." During his lifetime, Warhol apparently used some of these snippets to make a number of films. They were also used in other performance events such as Gerard Malanga's poetry readings. It's even up for debate as to whether these pieces should even be called films.

Tavel later recalled that "Andy never referred, in the three years I worked with him, to the three minute portraits as screen tests."

Further, Warhol didn't even oversee all the "screen tests." Ronald Tavel filmed some other films called Screen Test #1, Screen Test #2, Screen Test #3, and Screen Test #4 at Warhol's request. However, his descriptions of those films don't seem to correspond to the films called by those titles on imdb.com. For example, he says that Screen Test #2 was a long, sound film in which he asked Mario Montez a series of questions from off screen, but the description in imdb lists a slew of people appearing as themselves.

http://www.warholstars.org/filmch/screen.html

I don't know which to believe, imdb's description of things that actually exist or Tavel's recollections decades after the events, especially since the Warhol estate has issued all these excerpts of longer films and apparently new collections with new music such as The 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. Certainly, The 13 Most Beautiful . . . is not alien to Warhol's spirit, but what is its status for a purist. Warhol apparently used the pieces with a loose hand. Then, too, it's hard to imagine what Warhol would have thought about the very idea of a "purist." I mean, he himself used an awful lot of found stuff, and turned several people loose to release material under his name.

I suppose a "purist" could put the TV on mute, but the snippets themselves aren't even really films. So, why should it matter what order they're in or even what's going on simultaneously with them as they're being viewed? All this begins to call into question the very idea of a Warhol corpus.

I guess the phenomenon that was called the Factory itself calls into question the status of the auteur just as Michel Foucault asserted in The Archeology of Knowledge. Foucault talked about the death of the author-function as a dissociation of the "author" from the "text." The text is merely a deployment following the rules that provide the boundaries of a discursive field. So the field becomes the locus of investigation divorced from authorial authority or intent. Isn't that really what the Factory was doing during the years immediately before Foucault's book was published?

So the idea of a fixed text becomes fuzzy at best. It becomes nothing more than a historical investigation that seems out of keeping with Warhol's attitude about fame as ephemeral. If art is merely a commodity for immediate consumption as Warhol seems to suggest, then why should there even be a concern about the accretion of interpretation or even reverence surrounding his work? Or perhaps that accretion is the real phenomenon that bears investigation. This is what Jacques Derrida suggests in The Ear of the Other.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the fuzziness at the margins of Warhol's work is a great loss. It certainly calls into question a lot of neat stuff. Have you heard about Tyler Durden?