Cast: Brigid Berlin, Randy Borscheidt, Ari Boulogne
Director: Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol
Country: USA
Genre: Drama
Watch it: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturday series.
The legend of the inception of Chelsea Girls is that Andy Warhol drew a single line down the center of a napkin, writing black on one side and white on the other. In this deviously simple act, Warhol was actually conceiving what would be the next logical format for his photograph based lithograph series. The repeated image of his lithograph printings, increasingly bastardized by the beautiful limitations and obstacles of the medium, illuminated Warhol’s idiosyncratic preoccupation of staring at an object until it lost all meaning. This obsessive meditation would expose duplicitous nature of the object as it unwillingly reveals its inherent beauty and secret imperfections. These lithograph series already possessed cinematic qualities as they resembled strips of celluloid, so it was only natural to explore the capabilities of a different artistic medium and use it to combine these images into a singular composition that could breathe with life. This was a marked escape from cinematic convention as Warhol instead created a motion painting, a canvas obsessed with a single subject and capable of revealing its beauties and imperfections through its unblinking observation. The imperfect lines of Warhol’s lithographs are replaced by the imperfections of the human soul which reveal themselves with absolute clarity when the oppression of the camera eventually breaks down the carefully maintained walls of artifice that we have all built and nurtured throughout life to help us interact with one another without conflict and without betraying our sacred imperfections unless we are willing. Once those walls have been torn down it becomes easy to see the wounded narcissism of an angelic figure like Nico, who obsesses over her appearance with pitiable fastidiousness as she ensures the proper placement of each hair on her carefully constructed plasticine porcelain exterior. Warhol observed such superficiality without judgment, fascinated by street hustlers and the artifice of starlets equally, illustrating that the line between the two is practically invisible in America; the land of opportunists, narcissists, and lost souls plagued by the deviant self-destructive luxuries that only boredom can allow for.
Warhol harbored the same fascination with these prophetic street hustlers as he did with the rare and incorruptible beauty of celebrities, and in his infamous Factory he allowed a collision between these two disparate worlds that was previously unheard of.
In a post-war nation filled with the confused and angry sons and daughters of war widows and alcoholic fathers, a counterculture of outcasts and misfits emerged, confronting mainstream America with self-destructive habits and alternative sexuality that was previously hidden and punished in the name of “good taste”. Many of these misplaced misfits would find themselves on the vomit and piss covered streets of the “big city”, forced into dangerous lifestyles out of necessity but with “no direction home”. Warhol harbored the same fascination with these prophetic street hustlers as he did with the rare and incorruptible beauty of celebrities, and in his infamous Factory he allowed a collision between these two disparate worlds that was previously unheard of. Chelsea Girls shows us a literal juxtaposition of these two worlds, hanging two motion paintings side by side in the hallowed gallery of cinema and showing the ugliness and beauty that permeated both of these seemingly disparate and disconnected realities.
In an irony borne from the evolutionary necessity to focus on the immediate in order to survive, we are granted two eyes and two ears but a limited capacity to use them simultaneously to fully absorb multiple activities and understand them both in the same way. Warhol’s purposeful alienation in using two frames side by side knowing that complete attention can be devoted to one is evocative of the euphoric intoxication of visiting an art gallery. Each piece fights for our attention and our mind swirls with joyous confusion as we desperately attempt to formulate a reductive meaning that will bring everything together into a single cohesive idea, forcing us to choose which side to focus our entire attention on and which will act as peripheral noise at any given moment. Instead of the visual democracy that we are granted in a film like Jacques Tati’s Playtime where each viewing could be redefined with a shift of focus on the densely occupied frames, we are inundated with an audiovisual dictatorship where our attention is divided between equally interesting motion paintings of the toxic figures and ingénues that occupied Warhol’s life. The sounds of depravity and drug induced lunacy draw our complete attention to one panel while an unexpected splash of color brings unanticipated strength and new meaning to the seemingly banal activities of the “secondary” side of the film, using nothing more than a primitive color pallet that recalls Zapruder’s raw footage of the Kennedy assassination, using the shared preoccupations of a confused nation to bring profundity to the mundane.
Each piece fights for our attention and our mind swirls with joyous confusion as we desperately attempt to formulate a reductive meaning that will bring everything together into a single cohesive idea, forcing us to choose which side to focus our entire attention on and which will act as peripheral noise at any given moment.
The unique environment that emerged during the freewheeling days of Warhol’s Factory would ultimately prove to be toxic as Valerie Solanas would make an attempt on Andy’s life, thus ending an era of bizarre juxtapositions and the romanticism of self-destruction. Warhol had a fascination with characters from the streets that harbored dangerous demons and their attempts to silence those demons usually required dangerous and unpredictable self-medication. His insular nature made it impossible for him to explore those worlds and observe them in their natural habitats, so he constructed a sanctuary where both the dangers of the streets and shallow contrivances of celebrity culture could cohabitate; living, breathing, and simultaneously expressing the shallow and profound, illustrating the fine line that separates the two worlds while allowing Andy to sit back and observe with impunity. His attempts to observe the “real” created impossible realities filled with characters vying for their fifteen minutes with narcissistic veracity and a dubious subterfuge of self-awareness that drove their actions from the real to the surreal, but their contrived exteriors were just as interesting to observe as the most gifted performers. Inhabiting that world would require steadfast attention to one’s surroundings as danger and beauty could be found all around, often inhabiting the same tortured soul, and escaping relatively unscathed would require careful attention and the ability to reconcile the seductive duplicity of both artificial worlds. Chelsea Girls allows us to observe that impossible reality in an invaluable and alienating fashion that is as dizzying as life in Warhol’s strange and insular world must have been.
[notification type=”star”]90/100 ~ AMAZING. Inhabiting that world would require steadfast attention to one’s surroundings as danger and beauty could be found all around, often inhabiting the same tortured soul, and escaping relatively unscathed would require careful attention and the ability to reconcile the seductive duplicity of both artificial worlds. Chelsea Girls allows us to observe that impossible reality in an invaluable and alienating fashion that is as dizzying as life in Warhol’s strange and insular world must have been.[/notification]
