Chelsea Girls (Warhol/Morrissey, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 1.15pm
This 16mm screening in the Wanda and Beyond season (full details here) will be introduced by Elena Gorfinkel.
BFI introduction:
A group portrait in split-screen achieved through double-projection, the
Factory’s habitues and glittering superstars hypnotically monologue and
playact themselves for Andy Warhol’s camera in the Chelsea Hotel.
Comprised of twelve unedited 16mm reels, four in colour and eight in
black and white, The Chelsea Girls oscillates between scripted and
improvised elements, as the faces, gestures, and eccentric personalities
of the 1960s New York demimonde come into resplendent view.
Chicago Reader review:
The Chelsea Girls is in a different category from all the other Warhol films. It is the most ambitious and, in a certain
surprisingly human way, the most moving. Almost four hours in length, it
displays two images side by side on the screen, utilizing two
projectors at once. Each image has a sound track, but only one plays at a
time, and which one it is is left to chance or the projectionist’s
whim; I had to see the film three or four times before I had heard all
the sound tracks. The film purports to consist of different scenes of
life in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, long a home to artists and eccentrics.
The double image pattern makes the viewer acutely aware of film viewing
as a voyeuristic activity–one can select one scene or the other or try
to view both at once–and the camera itself functions voyeuristically.
The combination of bizarre costumes and settings, strange and colorful
characters, reels in both color and black and white, and Warhol’s highly
idiosyncratic use of the zoom make it sensually spectacular. Warhol frequently zooms in on a small part of the image, unexpectedly
and apparently randomly. At times we go suddenly from a shot with two or
three characters talking to an extreme close-up of a fragment of one of
their dresses. Another aspect of Warhol’s fetishistic vision appears to
be at work here. One series of canvases on view at the Art Institute
shows images of Mick Jagger’s head and shoulders silk-screened over
irregular patterns of cut, colored paper. Torn fragments of colored
paper provide bright spots to specific parts of the face, often with no
regard to the face’s structure. The effect is extraordinarily sensual,
as if each part of Jagger’s face is charged with a different level (and
color) of energy. The zooms in The Chelsea Girls have a similar effect:
they encourage the viewer to savor the importance, the beauty, of each
surface, each part of the image. The colors and textures of apparently
empty spaces contain as much sensual and erotic energy, for Warhol, as
the characters’ faces. We are not far here from the world of Blue
Electric Chair. As a veritable Hell of humanity parades before us, we
are always reminded, by Warhol’s camera, that no single human passion
means more than any other, or more than the most obscure corner of a
tension-filled room. The detachment of Warhol’s gaze knows its own
emptiness.
Fred Camper
Here (and above) is an introduction to the film.
