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Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film

2006, Movie, NR, 237 mins

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film: Review

ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM
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Two decades after his sudden death at the age of 58, the strange, silver-wigged figure of Pop artist Andy Warhol remains a subject of endless fascination. But unlike most treatments of the artist's life, Ric Burns' four-hour film is less an illumination of this enigmatic and controversial character than a reminder of why his portraits of Campbell's Soup cans and his eight-hour, slow-motion film of a sleeping man, were crucial to the development of post-WWII art and contemporary popular culture. Rather than dwelling on "Andy Warhol, Superstar," Burns assembles a small group of critics, curators and commentators to discuss Warhol's significance as a filmmaker and fine artist. Anyone looking for juicy tales of nights at Studio 54 with Liz and Liza will be sorely disappointed. Burns makes a fairly convincing argument that Warhol's rags-to-riches career paralleled the course of American life in the second half of the 20th century, and reflected the changing roles of its artists: outsider, superstar, brand. Few biographies are more "American" than Warhol's, which begins in Pittsburgh's industrial slums, where Warhol lived with his Hungarian immigrant parents until he graduated from Carnegie Tech. He escaped to New York and quickly found fame as a commercial artist, but fine-art success eluded him: Nothing could have been more antithetical to the masculine aesthetic of the then dominant abstract expressionism than Warhol's fey, easily reproduced, blotted-line images of shoes, butterflies and pretty young men. Even emerging Pop-art stars such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg shunned him, deriding both Warhol's commercial work and his obvious, career-risking sexuality. (Neither Johns nor Rauschenberg were strangers to either.) Warhol needed to come up with a unique artistic signature, and found it in crude reproductions of the crudest, least artistic images imaginable: comic strips, advertisements, film publicity stills, soup cans. And when he removed the brushstrokes and drips — everything that still identified his work as a "painting" — Warhol sparked a revolution. Burns devotes the bulk of the film to Warhol's '60s work, giving serious attention to the radical, often underacknowledged silent films he shot with the participation of the drag queens, speed freaks and high-society types who populated the Factory, Warhol's aptly named studio/salon/nightclub. What's missing from Burns' film is Andy himself: Burns makes surprisingly little use of the hundreds of interviews Warhol granted over the years, interviews in which he carefully crafted the attitude and persona that made him nearly as famous as his art; when his voice is heard, it's actually coming from the mouth of artist Jeff Koons, who produces a breathy, Warholian affect for the occasion. Even after four hours of talking-head commentary and Laurie Anderson's narration, that final black-and-white sequence in which Warhol films a young Susan Sontag at the silver Factory says so much about what made Warhol "Andy," and leaves you wanting much more. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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