Many things could be (and have been) said about the works of Andy Warhol-genius, annoying, confusing, hilarious, deep, a big con job.  Whilst the arguments can go back and forth for a long time, I’m not here to start the argument anew.  I make the assumption that everybody who reads this has their own opinion about Warhol’s life and his art.  (I also understand the sheep-like quality of most people in America, so I’m willing to be wrong)

     Warhol got into movie-making as a jokey aside from his more “serious” art.  He got a camera and just started filming friends of his doing….well, whatever they happened to be doing at the time the camera started rolling.  He then started showing these “films” around town and shot up the ranks of the burgeoning Underground Cinema movement (back when the term actually meant something).  So high up the ranks that his films are still considered important, if a bit grating at times.

     What differentiated Warhol from, say, Kenneth Anger or the Kuchar brothers, was his total and complete withdrawal from the film-making process itself.  For example, there were plenty of times that Warhol would just start the camera and leave the room, letting the camera record whatever was happening in front of it.  Whereas one could see a film-makers personality in every frame of most film (this was especially true of underground cinema, which didn’t have the resources of major studios, so they absolutely HAD to make their mark in other ways), Warhol’s distance from many aspects of the process was a provocative (and hilarious) comment on many things-the different aspects of the creation process, the imposition of personal viewpoint, the way audiences perceive things, the fact that he himself was a distant person who was unable to truly connect with others on a level above the superficial, the fact that he saw the world as being the same.  In many ways, Warhol’s personality shone harder through every frame by his unwillingness to…well, really care about what he was shooting or how it was edited (if at all).  Even the titles fit into this “minimalist” (to put it lightly) mode-“Blow Job”, “My Hustler”, “Empire”, and “Chelsea Girls”, for example, make us think that we’re about to see something, and yet, what we see is not what’s expected.  At the same time, by the act of watching these films, the audience gets a peek inside the head of the man who pointed the camera in the subjects’ direction.

     “Blow Job” is a 35 minute film of a mans face and upper torso as he, we assume, receives the act in the title (and by the looks of it, a damned good one at that).  By only showing his face, Warhol was expounding upon his view of sex being “the biggest nothing of all time”.  At the same time, by not showing the act itself (probably due to obscenity laws of the time), and only showing reaction shots, he made the viewer imagine the blowjob itself.  By us not seeing something, it doesn’t “exist” as far as ephemeral concerns go, yet by our very imagining of it, we raise the status of an act that doesn’t “exist” (“nothing”, on a philosophical level) to something much higher (a “big nothing”).

     “Empire” is an even more provocative joke.  The film is either a 5 minute, 8 ½ hour, or somewhere in between, shot of the Empire State Building from one spot.  Though I don’t think anybody other than John Waters has sat through the entire 8 ½ hour version in one sitting, the viewer is dared (by the length and the fact that the film is what it is) to try to make it through as much as they can.  (For the record, I did make it through, but over a period of 4 days.  I failed at the single sitting).  Now, whilst one can call this a hilarious prank designed to fuck with film snobs, that also gives it its appeal.  In many ways, “Empire” is a “fuck you” to peoples preconceptions of how they should view things.  By filming something people see everyday, in real time, for an extended length of time, then showing it on a screen, Warhol was forcing us to question how we perceive both real life (how we see everyday things) and reel life (what we expect whenever we see a film).

     By the time of “My Hustler”, Warhol made the jump from filming specific things and actions to filming….well, not really “stories”, but at least things happening.  A film in two parts, the first part covers a gentleman and his friends on a beach discussing the blond gigolo, an escort from a phone-in company, with them.  On one hand, this young man is very real, and yet the older man and his companions discuss him as an object that’s only there to fulfill their fantasies (not just sexual-the older guys friends are a bitchy fag hag and an older hustler past his prime, and both have prisms of fantasy/objectivity that they view the hustler through).  The gigolo acts oblivious to all their talk, and yet one gets the feeling that this disconnect is a survival mechanism (act distant and one can attain more information).  He also plays upon the older homos fantasies (another survival mechanism for prostitutes), thus also establishing himself as both a recipient and a provocateur. 

     The second half takes place in a bathroom.  The gigolo and the older queen are preening for (we assume) a night out.  It’s lots of talk (and hair brushing), and yet the tightness of the setting causes a physical claustrophobia that (we only start to realize) reflects the emotional claustrophobia of the beach scene that preceded it.  The odd thing about this scene is that while we know the older man has rented the younger one, their discussion is a lot of talk that seems to circle around this fact rather than open it up for analysis.  Whilst one would assume that this might be some kind of closeting technique, in fact it was a comment on the closet itself.  One has to remember that “My Hustler” came out in 1965, before the Stonewall riots forced the world to look at homos as human beings.  This circular form of conversation was an everyday fact for queers (any kind of blatancy could attract the attention of cops…still can, actually, but least, aside from the south, you can’t get beaten and tossed in a cell for it anymore). 

     But even aside from this, what makes “My Hustler” a revelation isn’t its time-capsule quality, but how open and frank it is even by todays standards.  When the younger and older gigolo talk about the “business”, there’s no weird guilt complex or stories of past abuse to cover up their employment record.  In fact, they sound like two guys from a factory letting off steam over beers.  There’s also the predatory aspect of attraction that Warhol shows unfiltered.  As a breeder watching this 40 years later, I can actually see the minute aspects of this attraction at play not just in the queer community, but the human community at large.  What Warhol tried for (and succeeded in doing) was to humanize what these characters were going through in a way that didn’t take away from their personalities.  I guess it should also be noted that these guys weren’t professional actors-in fact, these guys were actually doing what they did in real life.  Now, one could argue about the lack of any kind of “on-screen” charisma, yet what we get instead is something else altogether-real people re-enacting things they do in real life…and even questioning it.  The film ends with the fag hag and a woman friend at the door of the bathroom trying to hustle the hustler away from his john.  The fag hags friend says “why be tied down to all these old faggots?” as he’s looking at them and then…the film runs out.  Leaving not just everything that happened before, but everything afterwards, as a flickering moment in our head.

     Warhol would later take both the “real people doing what they do” and “flickering moments” aspects of his films and blow them up into something much bigger with the film “Chelsea Girls”, a 3 hour Plastic Inevitable freakout of image and sound which features the majority of Warhols superstars, filmed in various rooms of the Chelsea Hotel.  What makes this such a mind fuck is that the proper way to see “Chelsea Girls” is on a large screen, with 3 frames shooting out simultaneously next to each other, then changing the scenes with these frames at seemingly random intervals.  Warhol and co-conspirator Paul Morrissey (who would later helm the most popular of the “Warhol” films) shot enough footage for a 6 ½ hour film (equaling to about 20 hours of footage), but pared it down to a 3+ hour extravaganza of….Warhol films of all kinds.  Distant viewing of distant people (mostly high) talking about various things.  Putting this footage side-by-side also causes the brain to start bleeding the images (and the information they convey) into each other.  Our viewpoints are constantly shifting from one frame to the next, and our inability to focus for too long, mixed with the constant changing of what was playing on each frame at random intervals, causes one to feel as if they’ve entered another realm of experiential existence, and in a sense, you have.  See, the human thought process isn’t as linear as one would expect it to be…in fact, thought process’ is made up of billions of tangents that shoot all over the place.  By projecting “Chelsea Girls” the way he did, Warhol confronts the viewer with their inability to “fully grasp” anything aside from their own perceptions.  And at the same time…nothing much happens within said frames.  Just lots of talk, some drug use, but nothing that pushes forward a “story” of any kind.  Yet, as with all his other films, Warhols forces us to confront how we view real, and reel, life.  Are these people legitimized as “existing” just because they were filmed and presented to us on a screen, or would we negate their existence if we’d never seen them?  And how much of what we see is in actuality what they’d “really” if the cameras weren’t around?  And what the fuck was the point of the triplet display?  Was it actually necessary, or was it Warhol playing another prank?

     As I said, Warhol was an artist who provoked a lot of debate amongst people who’d seen his works.  With his films, Warhol not only caused more debate, but expanded the way things could be presented on film.  By showing people and things unfettered with “stylistics” and hyperbole, Warhol dared film makers and film audiences to not only be honest, but to find new ways towards a more open form of honesty (including through jokes).  The fact that plenty of film-makers afterwards tried to follow his lead only shows how much he really was kidding…sort of.