Melissa Anderson
Deep cuts from the artist’s filmography serve up a riveting showcase of scene-stealing freaks and oddballs.
Andy Warhol, Batman Dracula (unfinished), 1964 (still). Pictured: Jack Smith and Baby Jane Holzer. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 114 minutes (two extant, edited reels). Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. © Andy Warhol Museum.
“Essential/Unessential Warhol,” Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York City, through September 8, 2024
• • •
Whether Superstars or less-exalted beings, those who appeared in front of Andy Warhol’s movie camera indisputably qualified as “incandescent weirdos,” as Wayne Koestenbaum writes in his superb compact biography from 2001 of the Pop pope. Media theorist Gene Youngblood had a more academic, though just as laudatory, take on the people the artist captured on 16mm, noting in his foundational Expanded Cinema (1970) that much of Warhol’s filmography “contrasts ‘reality’ with ‘realism’ as manifested in the spontaneous behavior of actors pretending to be acting.” This weekend at Anthology Film Archives, Greg Pierce, the director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum, presents an assortment of extremely rare Warhol titles (shorts, features, and mid-length works), all restored and digitized by the Pittsburgh institution. Each of these bone-deep cuts—culled from a vast oeuvre in which even the most well-known films, like My Hustler (1965) or The Chelsea Girls (1966), still qualify as exotica for many cinephiles—showcases the unpredictability of a wide variety of charismatic freaks: drug- or booze-fueled motormouths, vamps of all genders, Teutonic beauties prone to gnomic pronouncements.
Two films are headlined by other filmmakers. Batman Dracula (1964)—the earliest and, at almost two hours, the longest (yet technically unfinished) title in the Warhol sampler—stars underground demiurge Jack Smith in the title roles, though the bloodsucker dominates. Shot over several months, this silent, black-and-white goth opus boasts a battalion of hams in a series of characteristically disjointed scenarios, each lasting just under three minutes (the amount of film Warhol’s Bolex could accommodate at a time): Baby Jane Holzer, the restless Park Avenue real-estate scioness, staring directly at the camera and trying to be seductive; Gerard Malanga, the Bronx-born Adonis who was Warhol’s assistant from 1963 to 1970, licking and shrimping an anonymous hairy foot; Rufus Collins, one of the very few Black performers in AW’s movies, dancing in a tinfoil loincloth. Yet none of these would-be scene-stealers ever quite eclipses Smith, so eager to twirl endlessly in a black cape or affix novelty-store fangs. As Andy recalls in POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980), Smith “really got into the part. He claimed that as he put his makeup on, he was slowly transforming himself, letting his soul pass out through his eyes into the mirror and back into him as Dracula.” Occultism and Method acting: Smith demonstrates they are one and the same.
Andy Warhol, Drink aka Drunk, 1965 (still). Pictured: Emile de Antonio. 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 66 minutes. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. © Andy Warhol Museum.
The far-left documentary filmmaker (and early Warhol champion) Emile de Antonio, the lone figure in Drink aka Drunk (1965), enters another kind of altered state, this one all too physiological. Drink originated in de Antonio’s perverse proposal for a collaboration—he’d drink an entire quart of scotch in twenty minutes while his friend’s camera rolled. Sitting on the Factory’s filthy floor, the stout documentarian glowers into the lens while adding more ice to his tumbler of J&B. Silent at first, de Antonio grows ever more garrulous; the torrent of words pouring out of him—some in French, some in Latin—ultimately devolves into a combative glossolalia. But by the second of two thirty-three-minute reels (Warhol was now using an Auricon, which allowed takes of that length and recorded sync sound), speech is impossible, as is the ability to sit up. Lying on his back, twitching and mumbling unintelligibly, de Antonio looks and sounds like an enormous toddler refusing to succumb to a nap.
Andy Warhol, Paranoia [version 1], 1966 (still). Pictured: Joan “Tiger” Morse. 16mm film, color, sound, 66 minutes. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. © Andy Warhol Museum.
While Drink reveals, at times excruciatingly, de Antonio’s growing helplessness in the throes of alcohol’s debilitating depressant effects, Paranoia (1966) highlights the nonstop chatter of mod fashion designer and boutique proprietress Joan “Tiger” Morse, a fan of stimulants. (“Tiger did take a lot of amphetamine,” Warhol notes in POPism—as did nearly everyone mentioned in this chronicle.) So constant is Morse’s jabber that the film, a record of Factory habitués trying on clothes and fondling bibelots in Kaleidoscope, her crammed Upper East Side emporium, begins with her in mid-sentence. Rail-thin, sporting metallic eyeshadow and a bejeweled dress, Morse first assists Nico—the German enchantress and chanteuse whose collaboration with the Velvet Underground would be released the following year—with finding a vest and trousers before turning her attention to Ingrid Superstar (described by Warhol as “just an ordinarily nice-looking girl from Jersey”). “Ingrid, come up here and do a tap dance!” Morse commands, one of a string of exhortations that also includes “You do not take a Good Housekeeping seal off the merchandise.” At other times, the couturier turns more pensive: “I wanna know if the Ku Klux Klan buys their sheets by the yard or by the piece.” Morse’s nattering approaches gale-force intensity, threatening to flatten Warhol’s coterie and demolish her entire inventory.
Andy Warhol, **** (Four Stars) reel 75 - “Sausalito,” 1967 (still). Pictured: Nico. 16mm film, color, sound, 33 minutes. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. © Andy Warhol Museum.
When Nico speaks in Paranoia—her voice once described, per POPism, as an “IBM computer with a Garbo accent”—her cadence is glacial, her utterances enigmatic: “I wish I could turn blue instead of red.” Two thirty-three-minute reels extracted from **** (Four Stars), Warhol’s twenty-five-hour colossus from 1967, offer further opportunities for near-Talmudic scrutiny of the singer’s visage and contralto. The beginning of “Sausalito” shows Nico in extreme close-up, seated near a docked boat in the coastal Bay Area hamlet. She speaks her truth: “One has to limit space somehow. Not to . . . drown.” When Nico isn’t in the frame—during, for example, stretches when the image consists solely of barely legible outlines of scenery shot as the sky grows darker—her bizarre declarations continue off-screen. The oddities of “Sausalito” assume an almost extraterrestrial dimension thanks to AW’s use of the strobe cut (which he had begun to incorporate the year before), defined by Warhol-film expert Callie Angell as a “style of in-camera editing in which the camera . . . [was] rapidly turned off and then on again, leaving a clear frame, a double-exposed frame, and an electronic ‘bloop’ on the soundtrack.”
Andy Warhol, **** (Four Stars) reel 20 - “Nico Music,” 1967 (still). Pictured: Nico. 16mm film, color, sound, 33 minutes. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. © Andy Warhol Museum.
That eerie, staccato cutting also dominates “Nico Music,” the other excerpt from Four Stars. Warhol’s camera zooms in so tightly on the vocalist that her chiseled cheekbones resemble alpine slopes. The segment follows the evolution of “It Was a Pleasure Then,” a witchy track from Nico’s debut solo album, Chelsea Girl (1967). Nico wails and riffs; off-screen, the sounds of Lou Reed’s guitar and John Cale’s viola thrash and thrum. Soon the lyrics of what will be the song’s third verse start to lock into place: “It was a pleasure then / to see the dying days again.” After this burst of eloquence, Nico returns to the nonverbal, whistling for the remainder of the reel. The sound is no less incandescent.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.