Chelsea Girls (1966, Andy Warhol)

Originally written 9 November 2008 for The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.

If one reads enough movie reviews and articles, eventually the expression “critic-proof” will emerge. Normally, this is used to describe big-budget, lunkheaded Hollywood blockbusters that are virtually guaranteed to be massive hits no matter how much the critics dump on them. However, I think the phrase could just as appropriately be applied to Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which I recently saw for the first time as part of the Wexner Center’s exhibition
Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms. Like many movies that are labeled “underground films,” Chelsea Girls stands outside the accepted rules of mainstream narrative cinema. The film, loosely structured as a series of vignettes featuring a number of Warhol Factory “superstars,” is a rebuke to traditional notions of “good” and “bad.”

Adding to the confusion is the film’s nontraditional method of exhibition. Warhol intended the film to be projected on two screens, with two different scenes playing next to each other. He also gave projectionists permission to choose which scene’s soundtracks they wished to turn on. Consequently, no two viewings of the film were the same, and because of this, there is no definitive integral version of Chelsea Girls, although I can imagine it being a prime candidate for a special “interactive” DVD cut that allows viewers to choose their preferred soundtracks or the synchronization of the images.

Because of its unconventional nature, I found the questions I normally ask when evaluating a film to be mostly useless. Instead, I approached Chelsea Girls like I would a modernist painting, asking myself, “how do I respond to this?” As it turns out, I dug it, as audience members might have said during the film’s original release. Parts of Chelsea Girls are confounding and almost tedious, like promising bits that go on far too long in order to fill the predetermined 33-minute scene duration mandated by Warhol’s 16mm camera equipment. But most of the time, the film is fascinating to behold, with Warhol’s experimentation sometimes yielding magical results.

As befits Warhol’s background as a visual artist, Chelsea Girls is often beautiful to watch, full of striking imagery both black and white and in color. Nowhere is this more evident than in two scenes involving Nico that bookend the film, the first a black-and-white domestic scene involving the singer/actress doing her hair while her son plays nearby, the other a closeup of her crying while brightly-colored lights play over her face. In addition, Warhol deploys a vast arsenal of camera tricks, including insistent unmotivated zooms, fiddling with the focus and depth of field, and even employing what I like to call “typewriter pans”- basically, sweeping the camera slowly over a scene from left to right before whipping it back to the left and starting again.

The two-screen effect also pays off, resulting (during my viewing, anyway) in some interesting pairings and juxtapositions. The most obvious example for me was the pairing of Eric Emerson’s extended monologue and a crowd scene involving many of Warhol’s “superstars”. Emerson’s monologue is of an intimate nature, as he discusses details of his life and his sexuality before doing a slow strip tease. Yet the lighting Warhol uses for him- mostly red and blue- is almost the same as the lighting on the other screen, giving the impression that Emerson is delivering his speech for an audience. Which, I suppose he is. Other pairings are more mundane, like Mary Woronov in one frame looking like she’s listening to herself in the other.

But while some scenes in the film come close to working as drama- especially one in which “mother” Marie Menken berates “son” Gerard Malanga- more often the scenes don’t so much build as simply exist, giving off a loose, hanging-out vibe. And while this has proven frustrating to those in search of the thrills associated with narrative cinema, it’s an essential and endlessly compelling bit of cultural anthropology, a portrait of the Factory era as seen by some of its most important figures. Many Factory favorites are represented here- Ondine presiding as a foul-mouthed pope hopped up on amphetamines, Brigid Berlin as a surly drug dealer, Mario Montez turning up briefly for a song, Nico of course, and most memorably Mary Woronov, berating Ingrid Superstar and International Velvet before going into her extended, uproarious version of a Hanoi Hannah radio broadcast (one of only two segments of the film that wasn’t completely improvised).

Warhol called them his Superstars, but in their “natural” habitat of the Chelsea (with its bohemian mien and Spartan décor) they feel much more like a pack of strays that Warhol took in off the streets. Perhaps that’s why they were so widely embraced by so many young people of the time, including John Waters, who has spoken fondly of the times he drove up to New York from Baltimore to catch the latest Warhol film. These weren’t big-screen gods and goddesses living in mansions in California, but people they could relate to, people who were trying to make their way in New York City before Warhol turned them into his own kind of movie stars. As Eric Emerson says in the film, “I can see me. Looks pretty good.”