Essential/Unessential Warhol at Anthology Film Archives

Greg Pierce, the Director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum, brought several rare (are there any other kind?) Warhol titles to Anthology Film Archives last weekend under the program title Essential/Unessential Warhol. And it wasn't until the final evening, during a Q&A with Pierce conducted by Andrew Lampert, that I not only fully grasped the "Unessential" portion of the title but also came to understand something about Warhol's cinema. Lampert's first question seemed naive at first: "Why are we here?" Well, we're here because these films are comically rare, barely seen by anyone on the planet in almost 60 years. But the question came immediately after Sunday's screening of The Andy Warhol Story (1966). And, as with Saturday's Paranoia [version 1] (1966), which Pierce judged a failure, it was pretty awful. So the question really concerned why we were compelled to sit through an indulgent, speed-fueled bitchfest with typically godawful sound, no matter how anthropologically or conceptually fascinating (an antagonistic Rene Ricard plays/lampoons Warhol while Edie Sedgwick floats around the edges and Paul Morrissey tries to get Ricard to speak into the visible mic). We were there because Warhol was one of the 20th century's greatest artists and/or we'd been transformed by some of his more readily available films (Blow Job has been ensconced at #5 on my top ten favorite films of all time list for decades and my screening of Empire a few years back remains a cinemagoing touchstone). But Essential/Unessential Warhol taught me that it's okay to deem some Warhol films as just plain bad at least until technology can allow us to discern more than ten words of his Superstars' babble over 66 minutes. Pierce even provided evidence that Warhol himself disdained The Andy Warhol Story (and maybe Paranoia too?). So the Unessential aspect is akin to examining Michelangelo's sketches or rifling through Bob Dylan's garbage with the crucial proviso that Warhol threw almost nothing out. 

As for the Essential, Pierce brought two reels from 1967's 25-hour **** (Four Stars) - reel 20 – “Nico Music” and reel 75 – “Sausalito,” both enchanting precisely because the sound was so crystalline. The Andy Warhol Story and (I assume) Paranoia were shot with an Auricon camera which records sound, muddily, directly onto the film. The **** reels were shot using a separate magnetic sound recorder and it's the making of those films. The former features Nico improvising variations on "It Was a Pleasure Then" from her solo debut Chelsea Girl with John Cale and Lou Reed performing off-camera and Warhol's trademark bloops skipping time forward. “Sausalito” (pic below) was even better, a calm travelogue observing dusk at a boat dock with Nico mostly off-camera intoning pseudo-profundities like “One has to limit space somehow. Not to . . . drown.” Warhol creates abstract images by focusing on crepuscular reflections in the water and toys with distinctions between inside and outside - at one point, a telephone rings, suggesting some of the footage was shot from indoors. And even with these reels, there was something of the scholarly about them since **** is technically 50 hours long with the projectionist instructed to show reels on top of another somewhat akin to the improvisatory nature of projecting The Chelsea Girls (1966)

Most essential of all was Drink aka Drunk (1965), two 33-minute reels of renowned documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, reportedly already tipsy before filming, drinking an entire bottle of J&B scotch in about twenty minutes. It's cute and fun for a while as de Antonio rants and babbles. But it quickly becomes distressing, even alarming as he starts to lose consciousness. He barely speaks in the second reel and passes out flat on his back. The camera moves not a hair throughout all 66 minutes and, despite the presence of several people during filming, no one speaks to him or intervenes in any way (although as the Catalogue Raisonné makes clear, there were some shenanigans during the fifteen minutes it took to change reels). Where Paranoia put me to sleep (blessedly so), Drink/Drunk had my mind racing with all sorts of questions about ethics, genre, sadism, masochism, subject, object, authorship, etc. I believe it surpasses even Blow Job as Warhol's greatest film (so far!) and now sorely regret missing it on the chilly evening of November 19, 2016 when it was last shown in NYC at MOMA. 

My remaining qualm is the claims critics and scholars have long been making about other Warhol titles with hideous sound. J. Hoberman, for one, put Beauty #2 (1965) at #1 on his top ten list for the Village Voice in 1988 and ten years later put Outer and Inner Space (1965) at #4. I've seen both on film and couldn't understand a damn word. And given that the former especially lives and dies with its back-and-forth sparing, I'm missing a lot. I saw John and Ivy (1965) at UT-Austin about twenty years ago and the professor who programmed it claimed that the print she'd previously seen had much clearer sound than the scuzzy sonics on the print we heard. Are there indeed prints with more pristine sound out there? Or are my ears rotted from decades of DJing, rock 'n' roll, and tinnitus? More likely the latter. Pierce told us he transcribed the dialogue of Beauty #2, a task I couldn't perform for more than a phrase or two, and the Catalogue Raisonné lays out significant chunks of dialogue from Drunk and John and Ivy (perhaps because the writers had headphones and/or the ability to rewind?). So maybe one day we'll get some Blu-rays or a streaming platform with closed captioning that will reveal a kernel of genius to The Andy Warhol Story. 

I skipped the first night screening of Batman Dracula because I saw a shorter/different iteration of it at MOMA last spring and two nights of Warhol scholarship was plenty. 

For more on Essential/Unessential Warhol, check out my pal Jody's post on Drunk and Paranoia, Elizabeth Purchell on the **** reels, and Melissa Anderson on the series overall.

The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)

The problem with Peak/Prestige TV's serial narrative form is that, at some point, the shows have to end. And like the de facto soap operas that they are, they can't end, not without upsetting their rabid audiences. The Sopranos circumvented this problem with the (genius, godlike) decision to have the show stop as if it were a Warhol film rather than end like a traditional narrative. Naturally, that pissed off most of the fans. But they needn't have fretted. In the franchisescape that is mainstream media today, you simply have to wait fourteen years for another installment. Hence, The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel which David Chase is trying to pass off as a standalone film. 

Qua film, it's a mess. Taylor/Chase parade so many characters in front of us for the first twenty or so minutes that even seasoned Sopranos freaks will need a family tree (a common problem in many films, though, cf. Sidney Lumet's 1966 film adaptation of The Group). Eventually, though, it settles into a story about not a young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) but rather his idol Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), infuriating some fans all over again. 

But The Many Saints of Newark is not a film; it's a cog in the Sopranos franchise, one that will no doubt inspire another series especially now that David Chase has another HBO deal. After all, Chase will have all of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to play with. So it doesn't matter how uneven or clipped or messy this particular film is. It will get ironed out with The Sopranos II c. 2023.

I will say that the use of music in The Many Saints of Newark continues Chase's mastery of distance. Van Morrison's title track from Astral Weeks plays over a romantic scene with Dickie and, at first, it sits uncomfortably on top. But the romance soon turns horrifying so that the Morrison track serves more as an ambiguous portent than a bucolic reverie. Even more bewilderingly, the scene ends with Mountain's hard rock "Never in My Life," a complete sonic 180. But it's a sound advance from the following scene with a young Tony in his room listening to Mountain through purloined speakers given to him (forced on him, really) by Dickie. It catapults the viewer out of the scenes in an attempt to gain some distance from the psychoses of these character-idols.

And there's a hilarious moment when Dickie visits his uncle Sally (Ray Liotta) in prison. Sally has become woke in lockup (meditating, eating healthy foods, listening to bebop) and asks Dickie to get him a copy of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool. He brings him one along with other albums such as The Happy Trumpet by perennial dollar-bin artist Al Hirt ("He's on Carson all the time."). Sally tosses it aside as "not jazz" along with the rest of Dickie's clueless choices (anyone know what the other album is in the first screen grab?).

 Still, I'll be able to accurately assess The Many Saints of Newark only once HBO Max makes the inevitable/perpetual third act available. 

Grade: B+, the classic holding pattern grade

Random Art from the Whitney Museum of American Art and Allouche Gallery