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 Naked Fog (Joseph W. Sarno, 1966)

Reportedly last screened in 1966, Joseph W. Sarno's The Naked Fog, shown over the weekend in Anthology Film Archives' Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends Of The New York Film World (1945-70) series, epitomizes that point in sexploitation's history when, as outlined by Elena Gorfinkel in her essential book Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s, directors took advantage of looser censorship laws and became as concerned with showing boobs than telling a story. Fortunately for someone like me who doesn't treat narrative as an automatic virtue, such spectacularization makes for a fascinating watch.

Early in the film, Marge (Sarno regular Tammy Latour), a typical Sarnoian prude, goes to a party with her boyfriend and it turns out to be an orgy. For about ten minutes (or so it seems), she stands in the doorway appalled at all the couplings and nudity. She finishes her drink and can no longer even nurse it in an attempt to avoid sexual contact. It all becomes too much for her and she eventually runs out. The story, such that is, gets under way here. But it will halt on a regular basis for acres of boobage. 

What strikes me about The Naked Fog (and much of Sarno' filmography in general) is that nudity is far from the only thing that stalls the narrative. Immediately after the orgy, Marge's voice over reveals that she took what little money she had and stayed with family in Long Island. But instead of finding a job (or even interacting with said family), she is shown aimlessly strolling on the beach and alongside waterways. Sarno displays her doing this a lot. These moments come across to me as one instantiation of what Betty Friedan called in The Feminine Mystique (1963) "The Problem That Has No Name," that ineffable sense of longing on the part of middle-class housewives for something more useful and meaningful in their lives. And while Marge is not a housewife and the one mother in the film (a madame Marge is observing for an exposé on prostitution) is rendered evil by trying to get Marge to deflower her infantilized adult son, she embodies the signs of that unspecified problem Friedan detected in the women she interviewed: "Their voices were dull and flat, or nervous and jittery; they were listless and bored, or frantically 'busy' around the house or community."

Sarno shows even minor characters ever lounging. At the bar/cathouse where Marge has taken up residency, the prostitutes play cards, smoke cigarettes, and sit around in bra and panties before the bar is open. No one really does anything in this naked fog of spray-stiffed hair and eyeliner Cleopatraed out to the walls. For the characters, this is a life of itches they cannot scratch. But for the discerning viewers at Anthology (and perhaps the masturbating ones uptown on 42nd St. 50 years ago), The Naked Fog is a sybaritic delight.

Actress and Sarno's wife Peggy Steffans was in attendance.