What Warhol’s cruel lens tells us about ourselves
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Movies, Creativity, Art, Culture, History

The Screen Test of Edie Sedgwick, 1965

I’ll Be Your Mirror

What can art tell us about ourselves? I don’t mean “society” or “culture” or “civilisation”, I mean us: you and I. Artworks can provoke emotional responses, they can make us think too, but can they say much about how we behave towards each other?

Andy Warhol is perhaps unique among artists in the way he took as his subject the very arena of our shared longings and loathings: stardom. You and I probably have very little in common, except that we know and think about — and sometimes get emotional about — famous people (that’s what makes them famous).

While Warhol’s screen print paintings gave us a representation of stardom — the Elvises, Marilyns and even the Mona Lisas — it’s his films that examine the mechanics of stardom, turning it inside out for his patient and non-squeamish audience to gaze into. In doing so, he confronted us with some uncomfortable truths about how we treat those who have — wittingly or unwittingly — found a place on a public pedestal.

Of the many Warholisms, the one that rings most true in his film output is “the idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting”, since there’s never really any action to come. Warhol’s films simply… happen. But they happen in a provocative, often menacing, way.

Warhol’s filmography is longer than most people imagine, beginning in 1963 when the artist purchased a Swiss Bolex camera. Sleep, the first of the typically Warholian mono-action epics, screens his lover, John Giorno, slumbering naked in Warhol’s apartment. Sleep was followed by a number of films capturing the mundane activities, such as haircuts and eating, as well as a number of three-minute long close-ups of couples kissing in the series Kiss from 1963–65.

Sex was explored too, notoriously and obliquely, with Hand Job (1964) and Blow Job (1964). In these two movies the camera is trained on the face of the ‘star’ of the movie (respectively John Giorno and DeVeren Bookwalter) as he is taken to climax.

Screen Tests

Perhaps Warhol’s most famous films are the series of “Screen Tests”, of which there are 472 films (over 500 were produced, but many were lost). Inspired by criminal mug shots (that Warhol used in his Thirteen Most Wanted Men mural for the 1964 World’s Fair), these films depicted celebrities, Warhol’s “superstars” and other hangers-on that visited his Factory studio.

The films were movie mugshots, in which the subject was told to hold as still as possible for the three minutes it took to exhaust the 100-feet of film in the Bolex camera’s magazine. The backdrops tended to be stark, and the subject sometimes harshly lit.

The first screen tests were compiled into two series: The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women and The Thirteen Most Beautiful Men (alluding, of course, to the criminal mugshots) but watching the movies you are immediately struck by the idea that the evocation of “beauty” is a ruse.

Much of the literature written around the screen tests focuses on the uncanny way the videos seem to convey so much character from such a simple set up. The paradox of photographic portraiture is conveying the depth of personality from the veneer of outward appearance.

While most photography employs allegory — signs and symbolism to tell the “inner story” of outward appearance — Warhol’s brilliance was to use movement; however minuscule that movement may be, it gives non-verbal expression to thought.

There’s more to it than that. These are, after all, called screen tests. Until 1965 Warhol referred to them as “stillies”, but later called them screen tests as the body of the series grew ever larger. The rename suggests that there’s a trial at stake, a challenge. These are not screen tests in the traditional sense, but certainly a kind of trial.

Warhol’s camera is a little cruel, a little invasive. The artist used different lighting effects for the tests: some are frontally lit, others harshly from one side, making the other side of their head almost invisible like a half-moon. Sometimes harsh lights from either side of the head cast a shadow like a cleave down the middle of the face.

In her screen test Ann Buchanan holds perfectly still (probably instructed to do so) and does not blink. Tears eventually well and fall from her eyes. Remarkably she does not blink for the full duration of the film.

The brief to the subject was to stay still and in shot while the camera whirs away. In the earliest “stillies”, subjects were asked not to blink, to stay perfectly still and very often tears well in their dry eyes. In one extraordinary screen test, Ann Buchanan holds perfectly still while a tear over-brims, rolls down her face and drips from her jaw.

These are ordeals, not constructed – and sitter approved – portraits. What we are witnessing is the differing ways that subjects deal with the situation they have been put in. Bob Dylan is defiant; Salvador Dali mugs to the camera (Warhol humours him by inverting the film); Lou Reed is evasive behind sunglasses and drinks a Coke; Billy Name gives nothing away; Nico reads — and then plays with — a magazine. Edie Sedgwick’s screen test is painfully affecting, she is as vulnerable to the camera as she is smitten to it.

Featureless Films

By 1965 Warhol’s confidence had grown and he had began to make experimental ‘feature films’ co-directed with Paul Morrison, two of the most notorious being Vinyl and Chelsea Girls.

Vinyl, 1965. Gerard Melanga is at the front. Edie Sedgwick, making her Warhol debut, is on the right.

Vinyl is a barely-watchable pre-Kubrick interpretation of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In a starkly minimalist mise-en-scène, Factory superstars including Sedgwick and Gerard Melanga shambolically play out the tale of ultra-violence and state control in the 70 minute film peppered with numbers by The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and Martha and the Vandellas.

Vinyl was the first of 12 Warhol films that Sedgwick appeared in. She had met Warhol at a party in 1964 and was snapped up quickly as a muse. Sedgwick was everything Warhol wasn’t: a young (21 at the time) American “aristocrat” who could trace her lineage back to the pilgrims (William Ellery, signatory to the Declaration of Independence, was also an ancestor); she was beautiful, extroverted and immensely privileged in wealth and social cachet.

Sedwick was also deeply troubled. Coming from a notoriously dysfunctional family, she had been tormented by mental health issues and was interned at the Silver Hill psychiatric institution in Connecticut some years before she met Warhol. Sedgwick perhaps thought Warhol was her ticket to fame and success. That was partly right, but Warhol had other ideas and the clues are already apparent in Vinyl.

The film shares a similar aesthetic as the fixed-lens Factory screen tests; the ‘actors’ bodies are cooped into a tight frame and shallow space (presumably in some corner of the Factory) and the camera stares down on them cruelly at a steep angle.

There’s something sadistic about the film above and beyond the erotically-charged “torture” of Malenga: the cold Warholian objectivity is palpable throughout, and the crude acting is almost abject. With no dialogue or real part to play, Sedgwick mostly looks on smoking, she occasionally dances on her seat. She appears in the film simply to appear.

You get the feeling watching this film among the screen tests that the Factory was more a kind of zoo, that the superstars were not just there to be looked at or admired, but to be examined — studied, even.

Chelsea Girls, 1966

Chelsea Girls (1966) takes place in the centre of New York City’s creative universe — the Chelsea Hotel. The film is a kind of drama-documentary that follows the lives of a number of the young ‘superstars’ that clustered around the Factory scene. Over six hours of footage is divided by split screen, giving us a diptych binary of the ‘white’ (innocent) and ‘black’ (dark) aspects of the squalid lives of the hotel’s residents.

The action takes place in front of a rapidly panning and zooming lens, giving the film a cool and detached aesthetic. Clocking in at over three hours, the movie is a challenge of patience that at moments (with emphasis on ‘moments’) explodes with vainglorious brilliance and sordid shock-tactic. The notable omission from the film is Sedgwick, who had demanded that her scenes were cut when she fell out of favour with Warhol.

Unlike the screen tests, both feature films have divided the critics since their release, and it’s unlikely they will ever be universally appreciated. The films are challenging to watch in their entirety for all but the most fanatical Factory scene devotees. The late Roger Ebert observed that Chelsea Girls employed “perversion and sensation like chili sauce to disguise the flavor of the meal […] Warhol has nothing to say, and no technique to say it.”

Whatever you may think of each film, they’ve made their mark more as a cultural statement, an epochal happening. The screen tests, which have fared well with the critics, particularly epitomise the 60s ‘cool’: a detached and laconic indifference that is still the template of stylish self-possessiveness. But there’s also a cruelty in these studies that we can still see reflected in self-destructive celebrities and the intrusive lenses through which we view them. Warhol reveals “cool” to be a veneer, a brittle shell that could be cracked.

Outer and Inner Space

The Screen Tests perhaps culminate in Outer and Inner Space, released in 1966. This film also utilises Warhol’s split screen technique (employed for Chelsea Girls) and is probably the apogee of his film output, a synthesis of the two strands of “stillies” and drama-documentary.

Sedgwick is filmed solo beside a previous film of herself, and again that is doubled (with split screen). The compounded effect is like an echo chamber and hall of mirrors at the same time, with Sedgwick seemingly talking to her “self”. Her integrated and unified sense of self — her ego — is stretched to the limit. Where, this movie seems to ask, does Erie Sedgwick begin or end?

Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1966)

What is perhaps one of the most notable legacies of the 1960s is the way the internal and ostensibly private “self” has become externalised, studied and contested. The sexual, spiritual, psychological and social revolutions of the 60s allowed us to be “our-selves” but exposed those selves to admonishment and invasive scrutiny.

In Beauty №2 from 1965, Sedgwick cavorts half naked with a young handsome man in bed while an unseen voyeur (Chuck Wein), off-screen in the shadows, asks her uncomfortable questions and taunts her. His questions and comments are hurtful and deeply personal, alluding to her mental health and family problems. She eventually loses her temper with Wein and throws a glass ashtray at him.

Warhol famously said, “I never fall apart because I never fall together.” He was notoriously elusive and private, often to the frustration of those who believed they were close to him. In many interviews he is monosyllabic. Appearing on the Merv Griffin Show with Sedgwick in 1965, Warhol, looking painfully shy, does not directly talk to the interviewer but whispers his answers into Sedgwick’s ear. The more extroverted Sedgwick revels in her role as interpreter.

Warhol fiercely guarded his inner self from scrutiny. Little was known of his private life until after his death. Instead he mirrored society’s perverse voyeurism and invasive scrutiny into the lives of the famous and infamous with his treatment of his superstar subjects. His allusion to never “falling together” perhaps betrays a reluctance to be a star who can reveal a coherent self to the world, especially when so many stars were falling apart around him.

None of the “superstars” actually became famous outside of the constructed microcosm of the Factory scene. Only Sedgwick — who was described by Vogue as “girl of the year” and a “Youthquaker” in 1965 — came close to real stardom, though not through merit, more a public fascination with her troubled personal life.

Warhol was of course genuinely famous, and remained the gatekeeper who simultaneously conferred a niche fame on the superstars while holding mainstream fame back. It was Sedgwick’s frustration with this state of affairs that led to her break with Warhol and her life spiraling out of control until her death at the age of 28 in 1971.

Celebrity-Cruelty Complex

It’s easy to draw parallels between the tragic case of Sedgwick and other celebrities who found themselves unwillingly subject to perverse levels of public scrutiny that will often lead to their breakdown or deaths. Warhol’s filmography is a microcosm of society’s celebrity-cruelty complex in which famous people are submitted to extreme tests of their self-possession.

This kind of cruelty took the form of invasive publicity – most notoriously the paparazzi – but has since been accepted, made overt and gamified for public consumption.

Princess Diana lived most of her adult life being photographed in the street. The public “appetite” for images of her gave rise to a breed of ruthless commercial street photographers known as the “paparazzi”. In 1997 she died in a car crash while being pursued by “paparazzi” photographers.

Reality TV shows like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here make a game of pushing celebrities and wanna-be celebrities to their mental and sometimes physical limits. In the latter, Room 101-like trials are devised to terrify and repulse celebrities (tasks include eating insects or having snakes placed upon them) for public enjoyment.

What is most extraordinary about this phenomenon is that people wittingly play along with it, and not just for money. People seem to understand that fame is a test, a leap of faith into the pit of your own self: you may fall together, you may fall apart.

Warhol essentially reflected the two great themes of his time: the mass consumption of goods and the industrialisation of celebrity. From the 1950s industrial serial production was put to the service not of grand public works, but to the enjoyment of individuals. The “worth” of celebrities is the quantity of their images in the media.

Warhol replicated that seriality, that repetition: Here are 100 soup cans; here are 100 Marilyns. But he also replicated the indifference of the machine, of the bottom line. ‘Good business is the best art,’ he said. Warhol’s superstars were commodities for public consumption just like celebrities are. We swallow them up, sometimes we spit them out.

Thank you for reading.