Foreword

Angell, Callie

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Foreword

Callie Angell

Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1

~I came to New York in the mid-1960s, during the time that Andy Warhol was shooting his “stillies” and various other short and feature-length films, including the 472 films that have become known as the Screen Tests. Although I went to an event at the Factory I recall mostly the crowds, not the evening...

Author

Callie Angell

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22126

Foreword

I came to New York in the mid-1960s, during the time that Andy Warhol was shooting his “stillies” and various other short and feature-length films, including the 472 films that have become known as the Screen Tests. Although I went to an event at the Factory I recall mostly the crowds, not the evening itself, and have no idea of whether or not I saw a film projection. I do recall more clearly going to The Museum of Modern Art and to various midtown art houses for Warhol’s movies. The Chelsea Girls (1966) simply had to be seen, and I thought Lonesome Cowboys, which came to New York theaters in 1969, gave new meaning to the developing art form of the deadpan take on 1960s life, although it was set in an absurd West rather than on a New York street. The films starring Candy Darling and the gang—Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Heat (1972)—were not to be missed. I adored them.

In 1967 I found my place in the city as a junior editor at Harry N. Abrams, where the editor in chief, Milton Fox, and Harry himself provided many insights into modern art, including that of Warhol. I well remember my cubbyhole near the mailroom, next to Larry Rivers’s wonderful Dutch Masters—his painted version of the popular cigar box with the Rembrandt group portrait. Twenty years later, in 1987, the year Warhol died, I was the director of the department of film at The Museum of Modern Art, and Warhol’s films had become the stuff of legend.

MoMA is one of the few American museums that collect historical and contemporary films as well as other visual arts. A significant part of its collecting activities is the acquisition and restoration of “avant-garde” cinema, that is, films that are thought of as experimental, poetic, or personal, from the early days of twentieth-century filmmaking to the present day. The 1960s and 1970s brought new generations of brilliant filmmakers, and MoMA, the Pacific Film Archive, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as other venues, launched or expanded daily programs of new directions in cinema. The film and video department at the Whitney was headed by John G. Hanhardt, a good friend and colleague of mine, who contacted me several years before Warhol’s death to propose a collaborative project: the Whitney would research and produce a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s films, and MoMA would deposit his work in our film archive, where the originals could be preserved, new negatives could be made, and prints could be made available to the public. The films were in Warhol’s possession and in need of preservation.

I thought the idea was a brilliant one, since this major part of what, in both John’s and my opinion, was Warhol’s greatest art was unavailable to the public except in stray copies here and there. As early as 1970, Warhol had withdrawn his films of 1963–68 from distribution, so for nearly two decades they had only rarely been seen. His films and videos had not been collected in depth by individuals or museums, yet they were every bit as valuable (we believed) as his paintings, sculptures, and prints, and in some ways more celebrated, notorious, and influential. John was eager to get the films shown again, so he and I visited Fred Hughes at the Factory and proposed that the films come to MoMA, where we would care for them, and that the Whitney and MoMA would present the work, following preservation and cataloguing. John became the director of the project, Jon Gartenberg at MoMA assisted in the preparation of the films and filmography, and Callie Angell became a special consultant on the catalogue raisonné, and eventually adjunct curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney and consultant to MoMA on the preservation of the Warhol films. In 1988, the Whitney showed sixteen of Warhol’s movies, including excerpts of Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). In 1989, Kynaston McShine, then curator in the department of painting and sculpture at MoMA, mounted a retrospective of Warhol’s entire work, including a selection of films.

Since then, each batch of restored films has been copied onto 16mm stock and distributed worldwide by MoMA and after 1994 by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. More than 4,000 reels of film have been identified, constituting some 150 films directed by Warhol in 1963–68 and 472 Screen Tests. Many people have contributed to this effort. Early on, Vincent Fremont was most supportive, for he and Fred Hughes at the Andy Warhol Estate understood the importance of reintroducing Warhol’s cinematic works, especially to new generations of artists. With an endowment from the Andy Warhol Estate, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. was established in 1987 at the direction of Warhol’s will. Soon after, the Warhol Foundation, MoMA, and the Whitney began their unique collaboration on research, cataloguing, and preservation efforts. In 1994 The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh, adding a new partner to the project. In 1997 the Warhol Foundation donated all original film elements and preservation funds to MoMA; gave copyrights to all titles and prints of preserved films to The Andy Warhol Museum; and renewed its grant to the Whitney Museum for the research and writing of a catalogue raisonné of the films. Generous support from the Warhol Foundation has enabled MoMA to preserve and restore most of the black-and-white shorts and feature films, various color features, and approximately 279 of the 472 Screen Tests.

Thus, within the past decade, a sizable number of Warhol’s “stillies” have been returned to public exhibition, enabling artists and scholars, art lovers both serious and casual, the young and the old, and the curious everywhere to experience what I believe Warhol intended: he wanted us to be seduced, fascinated, mesmerized, puzzled, irritated, exasperated, or any combination of the above, but most of all to be delighted by the works’ sheer beauty, daring, and wit. For the Screen Tests rank among modern art’s most significant contributions to the great established genre of portrait painting. The ways in which these works were conceived and filmed, the fascinating details of styles of lighting and shooting, the films’ relationship to Warhol’s other types of portraits, the stories of the subjects themselves and of their relationships to Warhol and the Factory—all this is detailed in this splendid catalogue raisonné by Callie Angell in which the Screen Tests are identified and their preservation is described.

As film and video, or media arts, have flourished in the past several decades, Warhol’s films have taken on the quality of old master-works. They are to be studied carefully, to be revisited repeatedly, not simply copied or imitated. There is much to be mined here with an eye to the development of the portrait from the Renaissance and the pictures of the Van Eycks, Dürer, and Titian through contemporary photography and moving-image works. There is much to explore about Warhol’s influence on generations of younger artists. Since their recent restoration and rerelease, the Screen Tests have circulated constantly in many countries around the world; I am curious indeed to know more about the sources of this steady demand. But none of this would have been possible without the painstaking work of colleagues such as Callie Angell; John Hanhardt; Peter Williamson, film conservator at MoMA; and Tom Sokolowski and Geralyn Huxley at the Warhol Museum.

Most important of all, the work will endure, thanks to the generous support that MoMA has received to maintain its film archives. In the steady and chilly storage provided for the “stillies” and features, the originals will survive and be available well into the future. Like oil on canvas, good old 16mm stock, properly cared for, will be with us for a long time, regardless of the comings and goings of new technologies and materials, and we can count on the films being there for scholars and filmmakers and audiences to discover in the years to come.

Mary Lea Bandy
Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film and Media
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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