<h1>Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures</h1>
<h1>Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures</h1>

Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist’s screen tests and non-narrative films from 1963-73. Within it we see sequences of his “most beautiful women” – screen tests featuring “Baby” Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Edie Sedgwick – and other works that showcase a parade of friends, actors, and models – Dennis Hopper, James Rosenquist, and Walter Burn to name just a few. This collection of tests is followed by the artist’s non-narrative films including Eat, Sleep, Kiss, and Blow Job. His films and videos capture the rich and raw texture of the fertile cultural milieu in which he lived and worked, and are crucial to the understanding of Warhol’s work in other media. Prolific, mercurial, thought-provoking, charming, engaging, dynamic, confusing – just like the artist himself, Andy Warhol’s films explore the gamut of human emotion. The exhibition is a unique collection of twenty experimental silent, black and white films from the 1960s, which we can only see on a larger scale today thanks to digitalisation in large-screen projection, in the form of suspended tableaux. This exhibition enables the viewer to essentially view the films, most of which have never been displayed alongside their counterparts.

This exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in cooperation with The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. It takes place under the auspices of The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Curator: Klaus Biesenbach

Screen Tests

16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, each 4 minutes at 16 frames per second.

This program includes:
Screen Test: Dennis Hopper (1964)
Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick (1965)
Screen Test: Susan Sontag (1964)
Screen Test: Salvador Dali (1966)
Screen Test: James Rosenquist (1964)
Screen Test: Lou Reed (Coke) (1966)

Selection from THE THIRTEEN MOST BEAUTIFUL BOYS, 1964-66

16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, each 4 minutes at 16 frames per second.

This program includes:
Screen Test: Freddy Herko (1964)
Screen Test: Rufus Collins (1964)
Screen Test: Richard Markowitz (1964)

Selection of ANDY WARHOL’S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, 1964-65

16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, each 4 minutes at 16 frames per second.

This program includes:
Screen Test: Jane Holzer (1964)
Screen Test: Ann Buchanan (1964)
Screen Test: Ivy Nicholson (1964)

Silent films, 16 mm film

Sleep. 1963
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, original running time 5 hours 21 minutes; excerpt at 42 minutes at 16 frames per second. With John Giorno.
The six-hour film Sleep shows poet John Giorno in various positions of sleep. Warhol elongated the “action,” recorded on one-hundred-foot rolls of film, by repeating filmed segments through loop printing. The concluding image is a frozen still, at sixteen frames per second.

Haircut (No. 1). 1963
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, 27 minutes at 16 frames per second. With John Daley, Freddy Herko, Billy Name, James Waring.
This was an early Warhol experiment in which six one-hundred-foot rolls were shot from six different camera angles. The dramatic lighting was designed by Billy Name, enhancing the homoerotic atmosphere, and the overlapping images and grainy texture give depth and richness to a particular type of portrait film. This is the second of three films labeled Haircut found in Warhol’s collection.

Kiss. 1963
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, 54 minutes at 16 frames per second.
Originally shown as a serial, Kiss features close-up sequences of couples kissing, each sequence lasting for one roll of film. It includes Factory regulars Naomi Levine, Gerard Malanga, “Baby” Jane Holzer, and John Palmer, as well as artist Marisol, art critic Pierre Restany, and poet Ed Sanders.

Blow Job. 1964
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, 41 minutes at 16 frames per second.
The voyeuristic camera focuses in close-up on the face of a young man, the collar of his jacket just showing. The actor’s head remains fixed within the frame, the homoeroticism suggested by his face as it signals the subtle rise and fall of his emotions. The sexual activity indicated by the title, if it does occur, takes place entirely off screen and is left to the imagination of the viewer. The film reinterprets a principle of early Soviet film theory, the “Kuleshov effect,” in which shots take on different meanings depending on their juxtaposition with other images. Here the “meaning” depends not on shot juxtaposition but on the suggestiveness of,the title.

Eat. 1964
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, 39 minutes at 16 frames per second. With Robert Indiana.
Eat shows artist Robert Indiana slowly eating one mushroom. Time figures strongly in this work; simple action is repeated and slowed down by loop printing, frozen frames, and a retarded projection speed. Sequences are assembled aut of order, so that Indiana never finishes his snack.

**Empire. 1964 **
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, original running time 8 hours 5 minutes; excerpt at 48 minutes at 16 frames per second.
An excerpt from the eight -hour shot of the Empire State Building, filmed from night to morning on June 2, 1964, from the forty-first floor of the Time-Life Building. In Warhol’s cinema, action is refined through a new sense of cinematic time-“real time” as a continuous presence. The one-hundred-foot rolls of films that make up each sequence or title can be likened to Warhol’s serial silkscreens, with their rough edges and acknowledgement of process and materials. In the films each roll constitutes a piece of time separated by light flashes at the beginning and end. This dialectic between the camera and timereaches its apotheosis in Empire.

Henry Geldzahler. 1964
16mm film transferred to digital files (DVD), black and white, silent, 99 minutes at 16 frames per second. With Henry Geldzahler.
The American curator and early champion of Warhol is seen smoking a large cigar. The slowing down of the speed of the already minimal action foregrounds the textures and subtle values of the film record of the human face. This work ranks with Warhol’s canvas portraits in its insightful exploitation of the medium and an ability to highlight the distinctive features of the subject.

Motion Pictures © 2009, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute, all right reserved.

Monday CLOSED

Tuesday–Sunday 10–18

Thursday 10–20

Dear visitors, the last entry to the exhibition is possible no later than 30 minutes before the end of opening hours.

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