“This may be a historic document.”
There are famous quotes of Warhol saying “I’ve stopped painting. I'm now making movies"
My name is Greg Pierce.
I'm the Associate Curator of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Today we're going to take a look at Andy Warhol's 1966 double-screen film "The Chelsea Girls."
"The children never come up to their expectations."
"I don't believe in that"
Even if you watch the film two or three times, your focus is going to change, so it’s always
going to have a different narrative for yourself.
So every viewer ends up making their own narrative for this.
It’s dealing with a scene that no one in the mainstream basically ever gets to look into.
So, it was a window.
For some it was, like, a vision of hell…
This window into this freak scene.
And to others, it’s like the Iliad of the underground.
Or, you know, there are other comparisons to, like, Joyce and Dante.
When "The Chelsea Girls" first premiered, it was made up of twelve individual reels that
weren’t locked into place yet.
So, early on the projectionists were allowed to, you know, with input from Warhol and company,
reorder the reels for different screenings.
It’s kind of Warhol’s first foray into this idea where the filmmaker makes something,
but then it’s not finished until the projectionist actually creates it in the theater itself.
Eventually, when the film became popular and it moved to the uptown cinemas, there was
need for a script for the projectionists to follow so that they knew what to do with the
twelve reels they were given to project.
Which is the standard version that we know of as "The Chelsea Girls."
There's a set 12 reels, and there's a set order for the way you show them and how you
manipulate the sound on them.
The films are dirty.
And I mean that sometimes in subject matter, but also just in, like…
it's the physicality of it.
Like, the way they look.
There’s no beginning, middle, and end to this film.
It's not a narrative that way.
There is a loose narrative that all these things take place at a place called…
at least what we're assuming is the Chelsea Hotel.
And these are the denizens of this hotel, and this is what they do in their different
rooms.
“Your girlfriend was beautiful."
"Your mother was beautiful."
"Your father was beautiful."
"All the friends you ever knew…”
It’s a pretty powerful blend of the scripted and the non-scripted.
And it really kind of showcases what Warhol's cinema was capable of producing in the sense of
personalities trying to follow a script, losing the script, not stopping the camera, and allowing
a new reality to come out of that.
"What else should I speak about?"
"I can't think. I'm just annoyed at this scene and my participation in it, although my participation was perfect"
"Oh hello dear."
For about the past three years I have been preparing the actual original film material
for digitization.
We are following the script that goes with the film, like any other projectionist, and
we are creating, in essence, one version of the film.
It's not a definitive version.
They’re just doing a 2K scan of the material.
The films, I hope, look like the 16-millimeter films that they are.
That you can see the grains swimming, that you can see some scratches once in a while,
you will see dirt go by, there's splices because there was...
you know, the film was damaged at some point, we lost some frames.
All that's going to be in there, there's no...
you know, we're not tweaking anything so that it looks pretty.
We were the projectionists for this version.
And that's what we'll be showing for at least for the time being, until we think
about the philosophical issues involved and, like, how to bring it back to a non-standard
standard version.
So those are my thoughts on "The Chelsea Girls" and Andy Warhol as a filmmaker.
What are your thoughts? If you have any comments, please leave them below in the comments section.
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My name is Greg Pierce, I'm the Associate Curator of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Thanks for watching.