I am focusing on Warhol's one film, titled "Sleep".
"It begins without credits, the image simply appears. Directly across the screen like a kind of horizon, is a breathing line, brilliantly, unnaturally lit, its fleshy curve almost transformed by the highlighted intensity. Recognition takes a moment: It is the rhythmically moving abdomen of a man asleep. We stare at the screen: Nothing changes, nothing moves - nothing except that abstracted human line, breathing in the unchanging rhythm of sleeping life. Once again, the light-blasted image begins to disintegrate as the emulsion itself beings to flicker upward towards whiteness. The roll ends, the image is destroyed. There is pure whiteness on the screen for a moment, followed by a new image: The man sleeping on his back, shot horizontally from below the knee. He breathes.
The clock ticks. In each of these two films, the camera voyeuristically stares at images of people for whom - in sleep, in eroticism - the experience of time has been radically, metabolically, made other, rendered private, changed. "
I feel that this last paragraph is saying that Warhol is filming something that is meant to be private, that he is watching someone where what they are doing is private, as the person would not expect someone to watch, or film them asleep. Yet by doing this film Warhol is making the private a publicly viewed piece of art for anyone to see. I feel that the piece is so long, 6 hours, because when asleep you do not have any awareness of time, and no sense of time or where you are.
“The image of a man asleep, mute and steady with an almost
geometrically defined artistic self-assurance, create a context that in
retrospect seems to define all that was most interesting in what Warhol was to
do as a film-maker, as he progressively abandoned painting in favour of movies
throughout the 1960’s, turning out with an offhand and almost profligate
productivity well over seventy films.
When he began making movies, neither Warhol nor any of his multitudinous assistants knew anything at all about cinematography. But, oddly enough, his complete technical ignorance only became obvious and burdensome a couple of years after he had begun, when he was trying to expand his methods and resources, after he was using sound and incorporating narrative elements that drastically expanded both the literal and metaphoric space with which the camera had to deal."
So despite the fact that Warhol did not have that many skills in film at the beginning, he still was able to make silent films such as Sleep, and so he was still able to produce films, yet when he wanted to push his films further such as including sound is when he ran into problems.
"There is a world of cinematic history and politics behind that mild, almost provincial little phrase Warhol uses - "art movies". Speaking very roughly, Warhol's early films belong in the stream of non-narrative, "poetic" avant-garde cinema, a very ritual branch of modernism linked historically to Duchamp, Cocteau, and Bunuel, and that transplant of modernist thinking to the American sensibility that has been most conspicuous here in painting. "
"The infamous Sleep. Six hours of some guy asleep with a towel draped across his groin.
People who have never seen Sleep, are sometimes under the impression that Warhol's notoriously immobile camera remains rigidly fixed for the full six hours, a mere mindless sentry perpetually at attention, gazing at a sleeping man. As a matter of fact, if not properly speaking edited, Sleep was assembled and constructed from several different shots of the somnolent nude. There were numerous shooting sessions; over a period of several weeks, the avant-garde poet John Giorno (who did the sleeping) returned repeatedly to slip off his clothes and resume his easeful task on the couch. There was never a camera movement and only a very occasional zoom.
P. Adams Sitney said:
Warhol made famous the fixed frame in Sleep, in which half a dozen shots are seen for over 6 hours. In order to attain that elongation he used both loop-printing of whole one hundred foot takes (2 3/4 minutes) and, in the end, the freezing of a still image of the sleeper's head. The freeze process emphasises the grain and flattens the image precisely as rephotography off the screen does."
Warhol said "it started with somebody sleeping and it just got longer and longer and longer."
I decided to look at Warhol's film Sleep, as my work is also now based around videos. Although mine are slightly different to Warhol's, yet the fundamentals are the same, looking at the unconscious.
My videos are in colour, whereas as Warhol's were black and white. Yet mine, the same as Warhol's are silent, as I am looking into sound recordings of sleep as a separate thing to my videos.
"There is a world of cinematic history and politics behind that mild, almost provincial little phrase Warhol uses - "art movies". Speaking very roughly, Warhol's early films belong in the stream of non-narrative, "poetic" avant-garde cinema, a very ritual branch of modernism linked historically to Duchamp, Cocteau, and Bunuel, and that transplant of modernist thinking to the American sensibility that has been most conspicuous here in painting. "
"The infamous Sleep. Six hours of some guy asleep with a towel draped across his groin.
People who have never seen Sleep, are sometimes under the impression that Warhol's notoriously immobile camera remains rigidly fixed for the full six hours, a mere mindless sentry perpetually at attention, gazing at a sleeping man. As a matter of fact, if not properly speaking edited, Sleep was assembled and constructed from several different shots of the somnolent nude. There were numerous shooting sessions; over a period of several weeks, the avant-garde poet John Giorno (who did the sleeping) returned repeatedly to slip off his clothes and resume his easeful task on the couch. There was never a camera movement and only a very occasional zoom.
P. Adams Sitney said:
Warhol made famous the fixed frame in Sleep, in which half a dozen shots are seen for over 6 hours. In order to attain that elongation he used both loop-printing of whole one hundred foot takes (2 3/4 minutes) and, in the end, the freezing of a still image of the sleeper's head. The freeze process emphasises the grain and flattens the image precisely as rephotography off the screen does."
Warhol said "it started with somebody sleeping and it just got longer and longer and longer."
I decided to look at Warhol's film Sleep, as my work is also now based around videos. Although mine are slightly different to Warhol's, yet the fundamentals are the same, looking at the unconscious.
My videos are in colour, whereas as Warhol's were black and white. Yet mine, the same as Warhol's are silent, as I am looking into sound recordings of sleep as a separate thing to my videos.
(Stephen Koch, Stargazer, The Life, World & Films of Andy Warhol, revised and updated. Marion Boyars, New York, London. 1991)
Warhol and Maas seem to have followed each other's work closely. Maas's early film Geography of the Body (1943), a series of magnified close-ups of nude bodies, certainly could be considered a possible influence on Warhol's 1963 film Sleep.
(Andy Warhol Screen Tests - The films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne - Callie Angell - Abrams)
