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The Andy Warhol Film Project The films Andy Warhol made in the 1960s are among the most significant works in the career of this prolific and mercurial American artist. In the short span of five years, from 1963 through 1968, Warhol produced nearly 650 films, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial "sexploitation." Warhol's films have always been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. With works such as Empire (1964), his notorious eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, My Hustler (1965), a social comedy about gay life on Fire Island, and the double-screen The Chelsea Girls (1966), the first avant-garde film to achieve extensive commercial exhibition, Warhol redefined the filmgoing experience for a wide range of audiences and attracted serious critical attention as well as much publicity. In 1970, the artist withdrew his films from distribution; for the next twenty years, most critics and scholars could only reconstruct these works from reviews and other verbal accounts. The Andy Warhol Film Project began in the 1980s when the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) agreed to collaborate on the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema: to catalogue Warhol's massive film collection, investigate its history, and preserve and re-release all the films in conjunction with a program of scholarly research and publication. Warhol himself gave his approval to the Whitney's project and handed over his original films to MoMA for cataloguing and storage in 1984. The joint project was launched publicly in 1988 with the Whitney's exhibition "The Films of Andy Warhol" and with MoMA's release of thirteen newly preserved titles. Other Warhol exhibitions held at the Whitney have included "The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II" (1994), which premiered fourteen newly preserved films, including the full-length versions of Empire and Sleep, and Andy Warhol: Outer and Inner Space (1998), a double-screen installation of Warhol's pioneering film-and-video portrait of Edie Sedgwick. The extensive research being undertaken for the project will culminate in the publication of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of the Warhol films, which will become an essential reference tool. It will document all of Warhol's cinema activities, with complete filmographic entries, film stills, and exhibition histories. Since 1989, 167 Screen Tests and more than forty feature films by Andy Warhol have been preserved and released by MoMA. The restored films are available for rental from MoMA's Circulating Film Library, and may also be seen in regular screenings at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney and the preservation of Warhol's films by The Museum of Modern Art are funded by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. |
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