Warhol was a central protagonist in a social drama that tried to make the 1960's look like another Age of Innocence. A childlike, gum-chewing naïveté inflects his visions of electric chairs and the ripped bloody bodies dangling from car wrecks; it merges with the pornographic lusting in so many of his films to touch them with an almost sweet aesthetic anodyne. Like that of the classic décadent, his aesthetics is the narcotic to a sense of damnation; unlike that of the déca...

A part of Warhol's negotiable charm as a modern entertainer is his work as applied art-naiveté. There is something both perverse and violent about pasting the camera eye on a limited field of vision, with limited action inside it, and asking the spectator to paste his eye over that, and just wait. The ensuing charm, I should say, is more than a trifle masochistic. But take the contrary view. A high pulse exists in the modern temper (I mean everybody's temper) for elective affinity with ...

The essence of Warhol's art—and by extension that of the Factory he heads—is the straight look at things as they are, and acceptance of appearances as an important part, perhaps the most important part, of the truth. It is the same whether the object is a Campbell's Soup can or the Empire State Building or some people just living, just talking, just being in front of the camera. And if what people are is what they appear to be, what they appear to be is very importantly what they...

The dramatic action of [Viva and Louis, also known as Blue Movie and Fuck] consists of the two characters struggling to find enough to say and do to fill up the time it takes for the film to pass through the camera. (p. 42) Several shots have been lyrically "composed" in silhouette, and something approaching a rhythm, or at least a punctuation, has been established by alternating long static takes in the classic manner and machine-gun clusters of frames…. The scene in which Viva and Lou...

[Ernie Kovacs's comment, "Show me a cowboy who rides sidesaddle, and I'll show you a gay ranchero"], which I heard the late great comedian throw away one time, is as accurate a summary of Andy Warhol's new movie, Lonesome Cowboys, as one can make. But the point of one of his films is never to be found in its content, but simply in its existence, whether it happens to be twenty-four hours long, as one of them is, or twenty-four minutes, as one of them might perfectly well b...

The speed and ease of [Warhol's] movie-making are based on the theory that nothing that an artist produces in the course of his work can fairly be called a mistake; everything he has done being of value because he has done it, all accidents are equally benign, and to have second thoughts about them, much less to consider "correcting" them, would be not only a waste of talent, time, and money but also a rude betrayal of the original inspiration. This appealingly circular theory has permi...

Screen Test is a transitional work both in technique and content…. Yet the "still image" device is still retained in Screen Test. (By "still image" I refer to Warhol's technique of reducing the action on the screen to small variations of posture on the part of the single image—variations that are further limited by Warhol's refusal to move the camera.) (p. 62) The burden of the film rests squarely on the audience. The audience, never catered to, is abu...

[The work of Andy Warhol] is the last word in the Direct Cinema. It is hard to imagine anything more pure, less staged, and less directed than Andy Warhol's "Eat," "Empire," "Sleep," "Haircut," movies. I think that Andy Warhol is the most revolutionary of all film-makers working today. He is opening to film-makers a completely new and inexhaustible field of cinema reality. It is not a prediction but a certainty that soon we are going to see doze...

[My Hustler] really is just a home movie made by a few people who know a bit about cameras and a bit about their subject, and like any homegrown product, it has its ups and downs. On the up side is much of the chat, which in its bitchy way is quite funny, observant, and full of the hollow ring of truth. The camera work for the most part is annoyingly perfect…. (pp. 72, 74)

[In this month's Andy Warhol picture, a stringy-haired blonde drawls,] "Are you as bored as I am?" Baby, we were stultified. Undaunted devotees of underground cinema shouldn't be disappointed in "∗∗∗∗" That's what it is called—or, rather Mr. Warhol, whose films have long since risen above, or beyond, mere title credits, calls it. Maybe it's just as well….

A delightful blasphemy, [Imitation of Christ] actually looks more like Bike Boy than Lonesome Cowboys; basically, it's just a series of encounters between Patrick/Jesus/Warhol and everybody else. Endless rap, much of it funny, and more in-references than the human mind can stand. Warhol's directorial hand is stronger here than in previous films—and a lot of the time he seems to be feeding lines to the actors. Certainly, Bridget's speech about her son ("They tell me he�...