Warhol Film Screening—Hollywood Stars/Hollywood Types

Floor 3, Theater

Warhol’s obsession with Hollywood was born early: as a small child he wrote away for autographed glossies of its stars and voraciously consumed Photoplay magazine. Upon the death of Marilyn Monroe in August 1962, the same month he took up silk screening, Warhol immortalized the screen siren on canvas. His suite of movie star portraits quickly expanded to include Marlon Brando, Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elvis Presley, among others, and became the subject for which Warhol is perhaps most widely famous. Hollywood stars, their scandals, and their manufactured personae held multiple levels of signification: they were aspirational figures as well as objects of desire, and acted as a means for closeted gay men to safely live out their fantasies of glamour and to test feelings around the fragility of gender construction. Casting drag performer Mario Montez as movie sirens Hedy Lamarr and Jean Harlow, or his ideal female and doppelgänger Edie Sedgwick as doomed “Hollywood Spitfire” Lupe Velez, allowed Warhol to experiment on film with his idols while exploring ideas of glamour, desire and gender portrayal.

Films
Harlot, 1964
16mm, black-and-white, sound; 66 min. at 24 fps

Hedy, 1966
16mm, black-and-white, sound; 67 min. at 24 fps

Lupe, 1965
16mm, color, sound; 72:30 min. at 24 fps in single-screen format, 36 min. at 24 fps, in double-screen format

Total running time:  169 minutes, with Lupe presented in double-screen

Saturday, February 16, 2019
7 pm 

Wednesday, February 20, 2019
2 pm

Tickets are required ($12 adults; $10 members, seniors, students, and visitors with disabilities).  See all screening programs for just $99 with the Warhol Film Package ($89 members, seniors, students, and visitors with disabilities). 

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