Andy said

Andy said a lot of things

I stored them all away in my head

Sometimes when I can't decide what I should do

I think what would Andy have said

He'd probably say you think too much

That's 'cause there's work that

you don't want to do

It's work, the most important thing is work

Work, from the album Songs for Drella – Lou Reed

Kolejne spotkanie poznańskiego RKF

13.01.2011 ( czwartek ) godz. 18.00

Tym razem zapraszamy wszystkich zainteresowanych na:

>>" WARHOL " David Bailey's banned 1973 documentary on the iconic artist<<

Rzeźbiarski Klub Filmowy
Pracownia Działań Przestrzennych
Uniwersytet Artystyczny/ Art University
Pl. Wielkopolski 9, s. 05 underground
61-746 Poznań, Poland

Andy Warhol, or Andrew Warhola as he was born, was an artist with no real equivalent in the art scene of today, one whose name is known even by those with no interest in his work and who became an iconic beacon for the like-mined. His face is instantly recognisable (only David Hockney can give him a run for money on this score) and he's still credited as the father of Pop Art, one of the few art movements that isn't an 'ism' and one that can still prompt traditionalists to dismissively shake their heads. His work continues to sell for ludicrous sums – in 2007 his 1963 Green Car Crash sold for a whopping $71.7 million, from an opening bid of $17 million.
He also created The Factory, a Manhattan studio that became a magnet for friends, aspiring artists, recreational drug users and image conscious hangers-on. It's a community that produced some important and exciting work in a variety of media – The Velvet Underground were a pet project of Warhol's – but on 3rd June 1968 this experiment took a dark turn when radical feminist Valerie Solanas, author of a manifesto for S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men), walked into the studio and emptied a gun into Warhol and curator Mario Amaya. Amaya escaped with minor injuries, but Warhol's wounds were nearly fatal – surgeons had to open his chest and manually massage his heart to revive him. Understandably, perhaps, he and his work were never quite the same again.

Five years later British photographer David Bailey flew to New York with a TV film crew looking to paint a cinematic portrait of Warhol by interviewing him and his fellow Factory artists. No-one here is identified by name, and thus the passing of time will probably have rendered most of them anonymous to those not seriously clued up on the early 70s Factory scene. Warhol himself initially plays to the commonly held image of him, quietly and motionlessly observing as others buzz around him like party flies, his most common verbal response (if an early brief montage is to be believed) being a semi-surprised "Oh really?". Early attempts to interview him are amusingly deflected, as he mouths pre-prepared responses delivered by an off-screen associate.

But slowly the barriers begin to fall. A discussion about Warhol's famous screen prints may not get Bailey the answers he's looking for, but it does at least feel as if the two are starting to connect, a bond that has clearly grown in the film's most surprising sequence, when Bailey and Warhol drive out to the country and the artist's self-created public image is temporarily stripped away to reveal a man still recovering from his injuries who enjoys horse riding and walking on the beach with his dog. It's following this that Bailey gets his best interview material, from a conversation conducted in bed in which Warhol talks openly about the shooting and its resulting scars to Fred Hughes' hair-raising recollection of the incident and how close he came to being killed.

On the way we're treated to a number of asides that many will see of typical of the Factory and its inhabitants, as one girl strips to her waist and makes ink prints of her breasts while asking Warhol to define Pop Art by phone, another loudly sings "I'm just wild about Andy" and pulls Bailey from behind the camera to dance, and a resident filmmaker tells us that "Everybody tries to make films very well nowadays so we go in the opposite direction, we try to make them as badly as possible." It's actually hard to know whether Warhol is serious when he replies to Bailey's enquiry about why he no longer likes paintings by telling him: "I never did – I just like painted walls," a seemingly flip answer that his subsequent explanation renders more credible.

It may meander a little in places and it's not as structurally adventurous as you might expect for a film designed to "capture the spirit of Warhol using some of the techniques which he has pioneered." But it's still a playful, engaging and occasionally revealing peek into the world of one of the key figures of twentieth century art, and its value as a historical document – of its maker as well as its subject – is considerable.

http://www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/w/warhol.html