Andy warhol's Film Creation

Sleep (1963)

Take a picture of a man sleeping for more than six hours.

Kiss (kiss, 1963- 1964)

This is a series of short films shot from 1963 to 1964. In each short film, the actors kiss for three minutes. This is a subversion and mockery of the Hays Office Regulation, an American film production law. The regulations prohibit lip contact between actors for more than three seconds. At the same time, andy warhol made a screen print (The Kiss), also called "The Kiss", which used the classic shot of Sir Dracula kissing Mina Huck's neck in the horror movie Dracula (193 1).

Empire State Building (Empire State Building, 1964)

For eight hours, the changes of the Empire State Building in New York from dark to early morning were photographed with a single fixed lens, and then the negatives were edited together.

Prostitute (prostitute, 1965)

It was the first time that andy warhol used sound in movies, but it was very rough.

My pretty boy (my pimp, 1965)

The film is about 65 minutes long and consists of two parts. The plot of the film is quite simple, like a story without a story. The first part was shot in a holiday cottage facing the sea. Ed, the owner of the cabin, took his bodyguard, servant Cory, and his new boy Paul to the seaside for a holiday. Paul sunbathed alone on the beach, while Ed watched him on the terrace of the hut. Later, Ed's neighbor Genevieve and another middle-aged gay man, Joe, joined him. The three of them began to endlessly discuss Paul's bodybuilding and how to seduce him and even sleep with him. The first part Finally, Genevieve tried to tease Paul on the beach and put sunscreen on him. They went swimming in the sea together. This part consists of three long shots, which are about 16 minutes, 4 minutes and 12 minutes and a half respectively. The camera is set up between the hut and the beach, so that the lens can move back and forth between them, and different scenes such as near, middle and far are completed with telescope heads. The second fixed long shot, only about 32 minutes, was taken in the bathroom of ed's bedroom. Joe taught Paul how to be a man and how to please his employer, that's all.

In essence, My Little White Face is a drama. The endless dialogue revolves around sex and teasing, reflecting the emptiness and boredom of leisure class life.

None of these films have a soundtrack. Silent, anti-narrative, long screening time and extreme orientation make them unable to be shown in ordinary cinemas. For Warhol, film is like an extension of graphic creation. Film is another carrier besides canvas and paper. Screen printing, photography and film are just part of Warhol's overall creation. It is consistent with a series of creative ideas of Marilyn Monroe's head to shoot the subject continuously with a fixed head length. Later, Warhol extracted images of oral sex, sleeping, kissing and the Empire State Building to make screen prints, and recycled his works in different media.

It was not until he established cooperative relations with Chuck Wayne and paul morrissey that Warhol paid more attention to sound processing. After the mid-1960s, the importance of Chuck Wen Mauricet in the "factory" gradually increased. In particular, Moliis's interest in Hollywood movies makes factory movies logical. If oral sex, sleeping, kissing and Empire State Building are the film creations of a graphic and plastic artist, then Chuck Wenmolise is involved in the film creation of the factory as a filmmaker. Since then, although the theme of Warhol's films is still avant-garde, it gradually narrows the distance with the audience, no longer challenges the limit of the audience's patience, and even adds narrative elements to the film and a sense of humor to the dialogue. Italian film critic Adriano Apra believes that Chuck Wen and Molise made andy warhol deviate from his experimental orientation.

Warhol's films are mostly 16 cm black and white films, and the particles in the images are obvious. If a camera such as a rocking mirror is moving, unexpected jitter will inevitably occur, and the telescopic lens will often lose focus. Due to rapid production and poor technology, Warhol's films have the flavor of family movies and amateur movies. This rough texture enhances the characteristics of the record. In fact, Warhol's Auricon 16 cm camera was a favorite model of journalists at that time. It is light, can receive radio synchronously and can shoot for a long time. This Auricon camera was purchased by me and me during the preparation of the empire, and it was at that time that he took a fancy to the long-time shooting function of this machine.

In Warhol's films during this period, such as My Beautiful Boy, documentaries bring the audience closer to the events in the film, and with the use of long shots, each shot is a real time synchronized with reality. Take the first part of My Beautiful Boy as an example. When the cameraman faced Ed, Genevieve and Joe, the audience seemed to be watching their conversation carefully. When the camera suddenly turned to Paul on the beach, the conversation between Ed, Genevieve and Joe continued in the form of voiceover, and the audience immediately became their peers watching Paul with them.

1966 the awarding speech of the 6th Independent Film Awards described his film like this:

"andy warhol brought the film back to its source, back to the era of Lumiere, and he updated and purified the film. In his works, he gave up the extravagance in form and content, and his lens focused on the simplest image with the simplest posture. The artist's intuition is his only guide. He records people's daily life and what they see around them with a paranoid mentality. Strange feelings began to appear in his films. The world changed its tone; It becomes intense and tense. The world we see is clearer than before, but it is not in a highly dramatic state, nor for other purposes. It is just a simple and tiny primitive, just like eating and sleeping ... "

Chelsea girl (1966)

This film has been successful in commercial and film reviews, and has been shown in more than 0/00 theaters in the United States/KLOC. Warhol's film jumped from the ground to the table for the first time.

As most of the paragraphs were shot in Chelsea Hotel in new york, the original name of Chelsea Girl is Chelsea Hotel. The film consists of twelve 30-minute short films, which are just fragments of ordinary daily life. On the surface, it looks like a documentary, but in fact, the actors improvise according to Warhol's concept.

The film adopts split screen, that is, two (or more) groups of images are shown side by side at the same time. For example, the first and second short films in Chelsea Girl are combined into a group, with the first short film on the right and the second on the left. The film has only one track, which is made up of two dialogues. This form makes two simple life scenes undergo chemical changes, which not only set each other off like a mirror, but also merge into an inseparable whole from time to time. The form of sub-map was quite avant-garde at that time.

The success of Chelsea Girl directly or indirectly inspired other American films to use split images, such as richard fleischer's The Boston Stranger (1968), Brian De Palma's Blow Out (198 1) and Mike Figgis's Timecode.

Compared with many Warhol avant-garde films, Chelsea Girl is a meditative work, although its form is dazzling. Warhol juxtaposes sad, happy, indifferent, flashy and confused sentient beings, and collages a portrait of modern people. At that time, Newsweek called it "the underground Iliad".

I, a man (I, a man 1967)

This is the first time Warhol has met a heterosexual partner. It consists of eight short stories, each with a different structure and size. In fact, it is a sexual adventure between the same man (played by tom baker) and eight women. However, his sexual adventures are always interfered by foreign affairs or ended without results. For example, in the first short story, the woman played by Tom and Cynthia May only met for the first time the night before. After getting up in the morning, Tom had sex with Cynthia again. Cynthia refused many times on the pretext that her parents would suddenly come into the house or the maid would come to clean up, so she had to rush under the bed. In the second short story, the woman played by Tom and Stephanie Graves is on the top floor of a building. In rags, she told him that she was a imprisoned woman and that her apartment was a love nest where she and her lover met twice a week. In the third short story, Tom and ingrid Posta are chatting at the dinner table. At first, Tom laughed at Ingrid's baby fat and clamored to see her breasts. Ingrid showed Tom her breasts, and Tom tried to touch her. In order to sleep with ingrid, Tom lied to her that he was psychic. He let her lie on the table and held an evocation ceremony. As a result, Ingrid talked about her boyfriend as an architect under semi-hypnosis.

On the surface, Me, A Man is a series of comedies. It describes that a person is everywhere and often can't get in the door, or he will have to give in to absurd situations to achieve his goal. In the role of tom baker, andy warhol originally liked jim morrison, the lead singer of The Door, but because Morrison's agent objected, he used Morrison's good friend tom baker.

In "I'm Alone", Warhol adopted the stroboscopic capture technology, that is, the camera must be turned off and on quickly during the shooting process, so that the image and sound will be interrupted and the actor's performance will not be interrupted. This technology must be carried out on a machine that can receive radio at the same time. Between quick switching, the machine will make a short beep and the image will be exposed briefly. So at some key moments in I am a Man, the audience just quickly saw the key points, accompanied by a series of flashes and beeps, just like the film was cut by the censorship bureau, which made the audience feel frustrated in vain.

Like Warhol's consistent view of creation, Me, Alone is a fragment reproduction of a series of life scenes. The film does not provide the context of the incident and the background of the characters. People are just symbols of rootlessness and homelessness. Behind these interesting life scenes, we see the emptiness and futility of people and the helplessness that people can't change the status quo.

Interestingly, the seventh girl in the film is Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol on1June 3, 968. Just like her role in I'm a Man, Solanas is a feminist. The first time she went to the factory, she looked for shooting opportunities for her script. The play "Lift Your Ass" is so avant-garde and bold that even andy warhol, who has always been bold, got a fright. He thinks that Solanas is an undercover sent by the police to lure him into committing a crime. At first, Solanas thought Warhol would adopt her play. However, when the script was lost in the factory for no reason, Warhol became the object of Solanas's entanglement, which laid the groundwork for her future filming of Warhol. She began to ask him for money and asked him to pay her rent at the Chelsea Hotel, so Warhol made Solanas guest star for $25 in Me, A Man.

When Solanas was filming, andy warhol was busy editing the film "Lonely Cowboy", and the bullet shot into his chest at close range, which almost killed him. Solanas's feminist work "S.C.U.M Manifesto" (cutting human society) published after her imprisonment once made her a symbol of feminist fundamentalism. 1996, mary harron, a Canadian female directors, put "Warhol" filmed by Solanas on the big screen, titled "I Photographed andy warhol".

"Lonely Cowboy" is a 109-minute color film directed by andy warhol and Paul Molise, starring Moliis's favorite actor Joe Dallesandro and factory superstar Viva. Lonely Cowboy tells the story of a group of gay cowboys living in a remote town with only one woman. The film was shot in Tuscany, Arizona, adjacent to some locations of westerns starring john wayne. Lonely Cowboy is one of Warhol's most explosive films, which attracted the attention of the FBI during the filming, and the scene in which Viva was beaten by a group was even more controversial. 1968165438+10 In October, Lonely Cowboy won the first prize at the San Francisco Film Festival. As a gay base camp on the west coast of the United States and an open city where intellectuals and students are active, the affirmation of the San Francisco Film Festival is instructive to Warhol, the director.

Blue movie (1968)

This is the last film directed by andy warhol himself. It's a color audio film with a length of 133 minutes.

The blue film, formerly known as Cao, 1968+00 was shot in an apartment in Greenwich Village, new york in June. Although the actors Viva and Louis Waldon have a real sexual relationship in the film, most of the time in the film is spent discussing the Vietnam War, cooking and bathing. The blue color of the "blue movie" is because the sunlight entering the room is ignored when shooting, and the whole movie takes on a blue tone after the film is developed. The original name was so sensational that Warhol simply called it a "blue movie", trying to avoid the eyes and ears of the FBI.

Judging from the social atmosphere at that time, both narrative and sexual presentation of "Blue Movie" were very inflammatory, which was consistent with the era atmosphere of moral disintegration and sexual liberation at that time. Therefore, it was repeatedly intervened by the police, and the film was withdrawn from the new andy warhol garrick Theatre, which was shown in a separate hall. After the film was removed, Warhol republished the blue film in the form of a book, completely retaining the still photos and dialogues of the film.

Warhol himself once said, "I've always wanted to make a movie about sexual intercourse, nothing else." Just like eating is just eating and sleeping is just sleeping. So in June 65438 +09681October +65438, I made a movie about Viva and Louis Walden having sex. I called it "fuck". "As Warhol said, some creative ideas of blue films really echoed his earliest films, such as the presentation of sexual intercourse, and the peripheral topics such as Vietnam War are just the framework of the film. Apart from sex and personal liberation, Warhol's films rarely directly mentioned or criticized the politics and society at that time. In the films of the same period, the nihility and paranoia about sex in the blue film overlapped with bertolucci's "The Last Tango in Paris" to some extent, but both films were calm and sad. The calm blue film announced the arrival of a new era and new moral concepts, which was sad. Andy warhol once threatened before his death that in an era of rapidly changing trends, people and things that became famous at that time would take at most 15 minutes, and the life span of trends was not as good as disposable diapers or condoms! However, Warhol's unconventional artistic view still continues to influence the artistic and cultural orientation of "postmodernism", although he once said modestly, "I don't think my art has any lasting value. "However, the artistic value is different from the artistic price, and the artistic price often exceeds the sale of the auction house. The real value lies in inspiring and deriving more artistic life.

Many film critics think that andy warhol can't be regarded as a real director, and they are right, because many of Andy's films basically don't need the action of "directing". His camera is just aimed at an object, such as a sleeping person, such as the Empire State Building, and then let his camera run for several hours. However, his photography and directing ideas are actually far ahead of his time, even our time. He took the film method-close-up-to the extreme and turned it into plots and events, thus restoring the original function of the camera. The instant wonders he created in the Empire State Building are also quoted by future filmmakers, so we can often enjoy the sudden lighting of many buildings such as the Arc de Triomphe, Times Square and Golden Gate Bridge on the screen.