Directed,
photographed, and produced by Andy Warhol. Executive
producer: Paul
Morrissey. Sound: Jed Johnson. With Viva
and Louis Waldon.
Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Blue Movie © 1994, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of
Carnegie Institute, all rights reserved.
Running time: 133 minutes
Blue
Movie opened in July 1969 at the Garrick Theater in
New York. It recouped its cost immediately but within
10 days the theater was raided and the film seized.
Blue Movie remains the only preserved Warhol
film that has been prohibited from screening. Tonight
it receives a new “premiere” in a special
presentation with Warhol Superstar Viva.
“Andy Warhol’s
Blue Movie is heterosexual pornography, somewhat
more cheerful than the sort of thing shown at smokers,
much longer (105 minutes) than the usual stag films,
and fitted out with lots of random talk about such
subjects as athlete’s foot, Vietnam, cops, Nixon,
Lindsay, termites and praying mantises.
In its crucial moments, it’s just as cold and
mechanical as any conventional blue movie, principally
because it’s impossible to be a third party
in such circumstances and not feel slightly absurd,
aware of physical details that—once seen—really
aren’t very interesting in themselves. I don’t
think Blue Movie will have an adverse effect
on any normal, coping neurotic adult, but then I don’t
think it will enrich anyone’s consciousness,
except at the chaotic speed with which our public
morality is changing, and of the Warhol continuum,
a life style and a body of work that are as indigenously
American as commercial television
Blue Movie pretends to dramatize sex as the
ultimate act of political protest, which, I suppose,
it does, as would any movie—even one about water
skiing—in which the characters are so preoccupied
with one specific activity that they have no time
for anything else. According to a program note, Blue
Movie is a ‘film about the Vietnam war
and what we can do about it.’ By this same reasoning,
it’s a film about air pollution, vivisection,
campus reform, the cause of the Count of Paris and
stamp collecting, and what can we do about them, which
is, as I understand it, nothing.
Warhol, who is a master in the art of reversals, structures
his blue movie more or less backwards. It opens with
a medium close-up of Viva and Louis Waldon, a pleasant,
stocky, 30-ish man, fully clothed, wrestling on a
bed. Without too much hesitation, they make love,
then talk a great deal, have some hamburgers, talk,
take a shower—all of which, of course, dramatizes
what we can do about Vietnam.
Having experimented—not very effectively—with
cuts between close-ups, long-shots and even panoramic
vistas in Lonesome Cowboys, filmed in chilly
Arizona exteriors, Warhol in Blue Movie returns
to the confined interior landscapes (bedroom, bath
and kitchen) that he knows best, most of the time
alternating between tight and medium close-ups.
Some of the images—not the clinical ones—are
quite good, pure nudes caught in the time and space
available only to the movie camera. For the most part,
it all looks quite impersonally improvised, except
for a startling moment near the end that may be a
sort of minimal hommage to Truffaut and Stolen
Kisses. Waldon in profile close to the camera,
repeats “I love you. I love you. I love you,”
while, in the background Viva goes about her ritual
of getting dressed, fixing her hair and, in general,
behaving like a real woman. Stag films aren’t
supposed to be sweet.
Blue Movie, which is literally a cool, greenish-blue
in color, opened yesterday at the Andy Warhol Garrick
Theater.”—Vincent Canby, New York
Times
Program
1: STRAUB-HUILLET’S A TRIP TO THE LOUVRE
Program 2: THE DAILY PLANET (Unearthed)
Program 3: DAVID GATTEN’S
SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT
IN NINE PARTS
Program
4: THE TERRESTRIAL OBSERVATORY
Program
5: BLUE MOVIE with special guest VIVA
Program
6: ALLEN ROSS’S GRANDFATHER TRILOGY
Program 7: LARRY GOTTHEIM
Program 8: MANUAL OVERRIDE (“Slip
Inside this House”)
Program
9: SHADOWHUNGER
Program
10: HEINZ EMIGHOLZ
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Sat
Oct 1: 8:30 PM |
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