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Photos from UCLA Film and Television Archive Warhol’s film
"Kitchen" featured a couple’s conversation around the kitchen.

By Suneal Kolluri
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

One evening in 1964, Andy Warhol set up a movie camera and aimed
it at the top of the Empire State Building. During the first 50
minutes of his film, the sun set behind the building and flood
lights turned on.

Those lights flickered periodically until they turned off six
hours later. And after eight hours of taping, Andy Warhol had
completed what is perhaps his most famous film,
“Empire.”

Warhol, though best known as a pop artist, also contributed to
the world of cinema with a collection of unique films.

This week, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will show a
series of movies by Andy Warhol in James Bridges Theater, both to
commemorate his work as a filmmaker and to support the film
restoration process being undertaken by the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Although “Empire” will not be shown, the selection
includes many films as unorthodox as, though shorter than, it.

Warhol’s spoof a Swedish film, "I, A Woman," featured a man in
the previously female lead role. "I, A Man" follows a man’s various
encounters with women around New York. In many of his movies,
Warhol filmed everyday events, creating a documentation of an event
or series of events rather than a cohesive story with a beginning,
middle and end.

“Somebody would be combing their hair, or somebody would
be drinking some pop, and people would just watch,” said
Geralyn Huxley, the curator of film and video at the Andy Warhol
Museum in Pittsburgh. “They were very meditative … It was
more about allowing people to reveal themselves through
time.”

Warhol did many of his earliest films in a minimalist style,
including one of a man getting a hair cut.

“There’s sort of a play with the spectator,”
said David Pendleton, public programs coordinator of the UCLA Film
and Television Archive. “There’s an enticement there to
sort of expect to see something and the complete deflation of that
expectation.”

Similarly, although many of the films are undeniably sexual in
nature, very little is shown.

Warhold made films about monotonous everday activities, such as
his film "Haircut," which featured a man receiving a haircut.

“Not very much actually happens in a lot of these
films,” Pendleton said. “A lot of the films are about a
sort of endless foreplay or banter that seems to have kind of a
sexual overtone but doesn’t get anywhere, at least not on
camera.”

His films explore homosexual, as well as heterosexual
characters.

“Warhol showed that an alternative cinema could be
viable,” said Chon Noriega, associate professor of film and
television. “His films are a precursor to queer
cinema.”

"Lupe and other films by Andy Warhol, will be shown Aug. 8-11.
The sexual, and often homosexual content of Warhol’s movies
was risqué by the standards of the 1960s. But according to
Huxley, an increasingly relaxed Hollywood was more willing to
accept the sexual nature of Warhol’s movies than it had been
a few years earlier.

“I think in the 1960s censorship in Hollywood was becoming
more relaxed for the first time, and sexuality was becoming
increasingly accepted in cinema,” she said. “Especially
avant-garde cinema … I think that the atmosphere and the culture
was just a little more open than it had been in the
past.”

As Warhol continued to make movies, his films evolved and became
increasingly complex. Though he moved toward longer and more
intricate films, he still chose to not use traditional story
structures.

“His films often just don’t end,” Pendleton
said. “There’s no big payoff. One of his fascinations
is also boredom. So there’s that conflict with the sexual
tension and that boredom that actually fuel a lot of these
films.”

FILM: The series will be shown at UCLA James
Bridges Theater from Aug. 8 through 11. For more information call
(310) 206-FILM.