Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne (Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonnee)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne (Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonnee) Details
From Publishers Weekly In 1963, Warhol began making short, silent films of the people who came through his New York studio, accumulating personalities in the same way he collected Campbell's soup cans or Brillo boxes. The first in a two-volume catalogue (which will eventually encompass all of Warhol's cinema), this book offers some surprisingly engrossing entries, while serving as a basic reference guide to the films. In addition to supplying the expected cataloguing data (dates, running time, cast, credits and other notations), the capsule biographies of the subjects and film action narratives reveal the fascinating and creative world of the Factory. Here is the tragic Freddy Herko, who "danced out the window of John Dodd's fifth-floor apartment"; models Ivy Nicholson and Imu; poets John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan; and musicians Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. Equally interesting are blurbs about the unknowns: "A young man named Stevie, with an illegible last name. Near the end of the roll, someone throws water on his face from offscreen." Several essays speculate about Warhol's overarching intentions for the films and discuss their mysteriously limited showings. Extravagantly produced with 780 photographs, the book reinforces the sense of Warhol as an expert in subverting notions of celebrity. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From The New Yorker Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol posed nearly five hundred hangers-on, Factory denizens, drag queens, socialites, critics, curators, art collectors, and poets in front of a movie camera for three-minute "screen tests": silent, black-and-white portraits shot mostly in closeup. This catalogue raisonné provides a comprehensive identification of participants, who ranged from the famous (Susan Sontag, Bob Dylan) to the unknown. Although the frame enlargements can't capture the arresting dramatic tension of the films themselves—how long can the subjects maintain their pose?—Angell provides a level of biographical detail that verges on the novelistic, weaving a web of acquaintance, collaboration, and random encounter that amounts to a portrait of an era. Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
Wow, it's hard to top Billy Name himself writing a review of this, but this book is a real gas and an essential catalog of Warhol's screen tests. You get stills from each of the tests, with a brief bio of each of the subjects. Always interesting and informative, full of surprises and humor, and exhaustively detailed. There were even a few color tests done, and you get stills from each of them too. Some of these people are true shadows and we know little, and some are truly beautiful (Amy Taubin!). I am really looking forward to Volume Two and the "features." Warhol being the most important artist of the second half of the 20th Century, it is even possible that these films may be his most important art works. Mailer said that we wouldn't recognize their value for fifty years, but we've now passed the forty year mark and my impression is that most people would still want to ignore these -- but time will tell.
