The Chelsea Girls

Andy Warhol – 1966 – USA

Andy Warhol must be unique in that his films manage to elicit the exact same responses now as they did 50 years ago, and entirely from word-of-mouth too, almost never from actual viewings.  Simply hearing about the concepts of some of his films causes blood to boil.  So rarely seen by anyone, his films don’t seem to vanish from the discourse entirely, (as much more prestigious films have), but still get talked about – with a mixture of annoyance and confusion – all these years later.  There are those who find the idea of Warhol’s films outrageously amateurish at best, possibly even a con, and there are those who refuse to consider them films at all.  There is a very good reason for this.  If we accept that Warhol’s cinema has any validity whatsoever, we are forced to adjust our definitions of what film is and what it can do.  If you buy into the film school mentality that there are certain things that must be done a certain way, you cannot abide an outsider barging in and doing whatever he wants without paying dues on film sets and without even the proper education on the finer points of Eisensteinian montage and the mise-en-scene of Murnau and Max Ophüls.  Who was this nervy guy, anyway?  Well, among other things, he was a brilliant artist who happened to loves movies, loved staring at people, got himself a camera, learned how to shoot stuff with it, played the results in theaters and got people to come see them and to talk and write about them.  If that’s not good enough to be considered a filmmaker, I don’t know what is.  There must be a million film school grads who never end up accomplishing even a fraction of that, but certainly know a lot about what makes movies good or bad.

The Chelsea Girls is Warhol’s magnum opus, at once the summation of his experiments into camera passivity thus far as well as a foreshadowing of his deliberate emergence from the underground into quasi-mainstream art-house success.  In the few short years between the stark, sobering minimalism of Sleep (1963) to the structured, verbose campiness of 1967’s Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol issued nearly a hundred films of all shapes and sizes; 15-minute portraits consisting of nothing more than someone gazing into the camera lens, and an eight-hour meditation on the Empire State Building.  Initially working alone, his earliest films are obviously much more personal and challenging.  Gradually, he brought in collaborators to “write” and “direct,” as much as those words have meaning in Warhol’s universe – (Ronald Tavel and Paul Morrisey being the key people in the mid and late 60s) – and eventually phased himself out and reduced his involvement to merely lending his name as sponsor and producer.  His obsession with film burned hot and ran its course in less than a decade, and instead of carrying on with projects he had no real interest in (like most in Hollywood do), he decided to leave it be and move on.  This is also a big source of the resentment against Warhol; that he had no business making films in the first place, managed to garner some notoriety, and then walked away from it without a second thought. 

The underground epic Chelsea Girls is a three-and-a-half-hour, color and black-and-white, split-screen, mostly-improvised extravaganza that is impossible to categorize in the framework of normal film labels.  There is humor and drama and there are sections that are as much documentary as fiction.  Although we never see the exterior of the bohemian Chelsea Hotel and the vignettes were filmed in many different places, the loose, implied premise of the film is that we are visiting various residents and eavesdropping on their mundane actions and conversations; whether it’s Nico combing her hair, or Brigid Polk demonstrating how to inject amphetamines.  The most famous scene has “Pope” Ondine berating and smacking a hapless young woman.  Almost all of Warhol’s “superstars” who were around in ‘66 make it into the film; including Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, etc.  (Doomed Edie Sedgwick supposedly shot a scene for the film but refused to give permission for it to be used due to believing she was on the verge of legitimate stardom.)  Even the Velvet Underground appear on the soundtrack.  The original film was not really split-screen but double-projected – (two projectors running side by side); meaning that every showing was slightly off and therefore unique.  And although a set structure for the film was eventually settled on for the sake of convenience, Warhol’s intention was that projectionists would run the reels in whatever order suited them, so that not only would each screening be different but the projectionist himself would become an unwitting member of the filmmaking process.  Most of the film’s twelve half-hour segments were shot by Morrissey, and he more-or-less maintains the stylistic philosophy established by Warhol in earlier films, which is comprised of nearly every filmmaking no-no imaginable – manic zooming, sloppy focusing, overexposure, pops, scratches, you name it; making it the victim of much hilarious vitriol from uninitiated viewers.  The Chelsea Girls may not be Warhol’s most accessible film, but it is his most important; a kind of all-encompassing testament work that portended his imminent backing off from hands-on flimmaking and sponsoring Morrissey’s takeover.  It is also, more importantly, an utterly bold and one-of-a-kind living experiment in cinema.  Some things take off and some flounder, but one thing I’ve noticed is that it forces admirers and detractors alike to ponder questions about the nature of cinema.  Unlike his critics, I don’t find Warhol arrogant or frivolous at all.  I think his personality, sensibility and obsessions all come across strongly in his films – just as they do in his paintings – and for me this is a leading measure of any auteur’s value.