Andy Warhol

Color/Sound/95 mins at 24 fps
(filmed late July 1967)

Tom Baker/Bettina Coffin/Stephanie Graves/Cynthia May/
Ivy Nicholson/Nico/Valerie Solanis/Ingrid Superstar/Ultra Violet

Tom Baker: “The first time I sensed impending danger was during a scene with Ivy Nicholson. She had stipulated that she would not appear on camera with me in the nude. Shortly after the scene began I walked out of the frame and removed the towel I was wearing in order to put on my pants. Clad only in unlaundered bikini underwear, Ivy exploded in an emotional fury and stormed out of the room in tears, claiming she had been betrayed. I was talking with Warhol, who was very much perplexed by Ivy’s behaviour since, as he casually pointed out, ‘Ivy’ll cut her wrists for me…’ My third scene was with Valerie Solanis. I felt no personal threat from Valerie. Just the opposite. I found her intelligent, funny, almost charming, and very, very frightened.” (POP273)Read More »

Will Sloan, UltraDogme.com wrote:
It’s cliché to observe that Andy Warhol’s filmography resembles the evolution of cinema itself. Warhol begins, as did Edison and Lumière, with silent films that invite us to wonder at a single visual idea (Sleep, Kiss, Eat). Quickly he introduced sound, color, movie stars, and more conventional visual grammar until finally arriving at Andy Warhol’s Bad (1976), which is so close to a “real movie” that Warhol himself had barely anything to do with it. Warhol made Vinyl (1965) at around the midpoint of his stylistic evolution, after his incorporation of sound but before Paul Morrissey’s domesticating influence. I like much of Warhol’s cinema on both sides of this dividing line, but Vinyl for me represents a beautiful moment when the evolution broke down. What if, after cinema’s birth, the medium had developed an entirely different visual language?Read More »