Andy Warhol’s Silent Movie Era

Julia Warhola would take her son Andy with her when she would try to sell flower-like sculptures made from tin cans; this was during the Depression (Warhol was born in 1928), and money was scarce. If the family had soup, it was often ketchup mixed with hot water rather than Campbell’s Soup, which would have been more of a luxury at that time.

The young Warhol was a bit sickly, and he collected images of his favorite movie stars, including an autographed photo from Shirley Temple, one of his childhood idols. It took some doing to move his way out of his working-class Pittsburgh milieu, but he got a small scholarship to go to the Carnegie Institute of Technology to study commercial art. When he was failing some of his classes, Warhol went to his instructors and even cried a bit and pleaded to be able to stay on, so he could be vulnerable when he was young, and canny enough to make use of that vulnerability.

Warhol, who was still known as Andy Warhola, moved to Manhattan in 1949, and it was a long, slow climb towards becoming the controversial top of the art world. He worked as a commercial designer all through the 1950s, and his mother Julia came out from Pittsburgh and moved in with him, but just why she did that and what their relationship was to each other remains somewhat mysterious.

Mother and son led fairly separate lives most of the time, especially once Warhol was able to purchase a townhouse on East 66th Street, and from all accounts it sounds like Warhol himself didn’t quite know what to make of his mother or her own influence on him. She could be as complex and eccentric as he was, and perhaps he didn’t feel loved by her, or seen completely. He was gay, and Julia seems to have basically known that, but still she talked to women in hopes that one of them would marry her son.

Warhol would tell people in the 1950s that he wanted to be as famous as the Queen of England, but this must have sounded very unlikely to those around him, a group of window dresser queens who carried on and camped at the restaurant Serendipity on East 60th Street. As macho Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning lorded it over the art world while hard-ass closet queen gay conceptual painters like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg made their own progress (while keeping their own relationship an open secret), the swish young Warhol would submit drawings of men kissing to galleries and get turned down out of hand.

The turning point for him came at the dawn of the 1960s, which was a decade that Warhol defined to a very large extent with his Campbell’s Soup Paintings, with their threatening reds, and his movie star portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, which look like stills collected in fan-like sincerity that Warhol decided to make slightly ugly and grotesque with the application of lurid coloring. As late as 1981, Warhol returned to this mode with a work simply called The Star, and that star was Greta Garbo in a still from Mata Hari (1931) that he painted a mean red. Warhol had a love/hate relationship with the stars, and especially that star of stars Garbo, who absentmindedly crumpled up a butterfly drawing the young Warhol gave her at a picnic in the 1950s. Warhol brought this home to Julia and they decided to call it, “Crumpled Butterfly by Greta Garbo,” which Julia wrote on it.

Warhol’s “look” in the 1960s is very Garbo, if you think of it: dark glasses, and a silver-ish wig to hide his lack of hair. And when he moved into what became known as the Silver Factory, his place of work and dark creative environment at 231 East 47th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, surely Warhol was aware that this location was very close to Garbo’s longtime residence at 450 East 52nd Street. But Warhol didn’t want to be alone. He surrounded himself with younger men like the gorgeous Gerard Malanga, a live wire of sexual energy, and the scarier Billy Name, who created his own world of amphetamine users at the Factory (amphetamines were easy to get then and the obsessive-compulsive Warhol used them himself).

Inspired by the underground film scene (he watched Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures 24 times in the spring of 1963), Warhol bought a Bolex 16mm camera and decided to make a movie of his own of his lover John Giorno sleeping. The resulting film Sleep, rarely seen in its over five-hour entirety, is somewhat disappointing in that the technical limitations of the camera Warhol was using only allowed him a certain amount of time for a take, and so he was forced to loop certain shots a few times to make it seem as if we are watching a full night’s sleep, and so this feels like a bit of a cheat. Warhol was the sort of “beyond sophistication” avant gardist and hardcore conceptual artist who didn’t believe in mistakes; the only thing he was ever against was the most crass commercial option. But the camera he was working with did not allow him to fully realize his conception for Sleep.

When Warhol asked Giorno if he wanted to be a movie star and the star of Sleep, the young poet had said he wanted to be “like Marilyn Monroe,” and there is an eroticism to these short shots looped all these hours of Warhol’s handsome and naked male lover, an aspect of the film that could not be written about at the time. The breath of life is there in these shots of Giorno, who is a happy and peaceful sleeper; he seems to be having a good dream some of the time. It’s sexy when his head finally moves and jerks upward, and there is a mystery and a helplessness to his sleeping that Warhol deeply appreciated. Even before he thought of shooting this movie, Warhol would often watch Giorno sleep.

Warhol wanted difficulty and ugliness and a dropping of the mask in his movies, which would later lead to the often-contrived conflict of his mid-1960s talking films; he wanted to expose what he felt was a void, and leave open the possibility of discovering something more tangible, and he manages to do this in his best silent films of the early 1960s, particularly Kiss (1963), Eat (1964), Blow Job (1964), and Empire (1964).

In Kiss, a series of short silent films of various couples kissing, the clear star or superstar is Malanga, who proves himself a true make-out artist with Baby Jane Holzer (her pleasure in his devouring passion with her is very evident) and a very game kisser with Mark Lancaster, who has said that he didn’t like and/or trust Malanga, and so the result is fascinatingly tense, with Lancaster keeping his eyes open and Malanga keeping his closed. It was Giorno who suggested to the skittish Warhol that he should include males kissing in Kiss, and there is also an interracial kiss between Rufus Collins and Naomi Levine, an African-American man and a white woman, and these provocations for the time were seen on a loop in the entrance to the lobby at the third New York Film Festival.

Robert Indiana, who later created the treacly LOVE sculptures, one of which can still be seen in midtown Manhattan, brings a meditative calm to Eat, in which he slowly eats a mushroom and plays with a cat, but the real showstopper of these early silent Warhols is Blow Job, which must be seen in its full 40-or-so minute version for maximum impact. We only see the face of the young blond DeVeren Bookwalter as he submits to the pleasure of the sex act in the title, which was provided for him, according to Malanga, by the bruiser poet Willard Maas, who had been Malanga’s lover and mentor. Bookwalter was a serious classical theater actor, and his work alternated between Shakespeare on stage and hardcore porn later on film, a mix of high and low that couldn’t be more Warholian.

There is something nearly satanic in Bookwalter’s knowing smile as Blow Job begins, but this soon gives way to his first ecstasy as he leans his head back into lighting that molds his face in a Marlene Dietrich-like way, so that this is very much Warhol’s Josef von Sternberg picture. Warhol gets his blond stud immobilized against a brick wall so that he can see all the waves of pleasure that roll across his pretty face; about nine minutes in Bookwalter looks at the camera and smiles a dirty smile and nods, as if Warhol has asked him, “Is it good?”

But about 17 minutes in, it looks like something downright evil has been unleashed in Bookwalter’s eyes by this pleasure, and then a pained expression, and this could not be more exciting because Warhol does capture something here on a human face that seems to prove there is something to life other than a void waiting to extinguish us forever, and that there is meaning to this beyond what we can say about it or interpret.

Blow Job is Warhol’s most revelatory movie, and it also happens to be one of the most erotic movies ever made precisely because it’s all mental and leaves the sexual act to our imagination. Bookwalter does seem to climax about a half hour in, around the time both of his hands flutter up behind him in a beautiful gesture of surrender, and afterward he looks despairing, a little violated, and depressed as he lights a cigarette. There is a moral transgressiveness about Warhol’s art and the way he used people for it sometimes that cannot be ignored, or too easily condoned.

The most infamous of all early Warhol movies, which were regarded as “spoofs of experimentation” by the suspicious Pauline Kael, is Empire, an eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building that succeeds where Sleep doesn’t because Warhol was able to rent a camera that could stay with this campy Art Deco marvel of a building a full night’s sleep worth of time, or like what a janitor might see on the overnight shift in some adjacent high-rise. The shot stares out the window at the Empire State Building, and staring out a window is usually a signal of longing, a need to escape. And also, as almost always with Warhol, there was a sexual connotation: “An eight-hour hard-on!” he cried to Jonas Mekas, Malanga, and those others present for the shoot. He also said, “The Empire State Building is a star!”

Empire for 60 years has been more a notion than a film that could actually be experienced. The Warhol museum in Pittsburgh has been strict about the dissemination of Warhol films, which were mainly withdrawn by the artist himself in the early 1970s. At Kim’s Video in the early 2000s, representatives from that museum would regularly confiscate bootleg Warhol movies on tape, and of course this gave them a forbidden cachet. And so it took me somewhat by surprise to see Empire (all of it!) up on YouTube, where it has been seen 48,000 times over the space of a year, a larger audience, surely, than it has ever had.

Warhol himself, and his later house director Paul Morrissey, suggested that the ideal space for these early films was not a movie theater or even a gallery but on TV in a private home, where they could be put on like a fireplace, and this turned out to be true for me as I put Empire on my TV, through YouTube, and just kept it on all day. The first hour is rather exciting; the star building in darkness as the light begins to go and clouds and airplanes move behind it (the shot was started at 8pm on a summer day). The lights on the building turn on, and this also causes some excitement or expectation.

But once daylight is truly gone, the only thing that happens for the next six or more hours is the blinking of little lights, and as I kept looking back to stare at Empire, somehow thinking something would happen, I was met with a depressing sort of nighttime void and numbness, and also the kitsch association of one of those paintings of bridges with electric lights in it, one of which my grandmother on my father’s side had over her couch. Part of my anxiety in watching Empire, which Warhol could not have predicted, is that I expected a plane to crash into it, the residue of having lived through September 11, 2001 in Manhattan.

Mekas and Malanga and the others with Warhol sometimes urged him to move the camera during the Empire shoot, but Warhol wouldn’t budge it. By the end of the film, in its last half hour, some of the lights go out, and this makes the star building look more beautiful and glamorous, like an evening gown, or like a beckoning person or ghost of a person, and this feels both lovely and ominous after so many hours of unchanging nothingness, those little blinking lights not doing much to assuage any anxiety about the meaninglessness of human creations like the Empire State Building. (If you watch more carefully than I did, you are supposed to be able to sometimes see Warhol and others in the reflection of the window changing the reels, but I’m not convinced this would make the film less unsettling.)

Warhol’s Silver Factory superstars sometimes called him Drella, a combination of Cinderella and Dracula, but usually not to his face, and Drella predicted so much of our current culture of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and cruelty that spreads like wildfire. He survived an attempt on his life in 1968 when the mad quasi-superstar Valerie Solanas shot him and then had the nerve to call up his office afterward and ask for money for her legal defense and also (here’s the kicker) his help in getting her on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. After shooting him! The need to be famous and known for Solanas was inextricably bound up in the urge to destroy, and maybe this pushed Warhol to his far softer image of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Julia died in 1972 after a long bout with dementia, and Warhol’s feelings about her remained unresolved, and perhaps a little bitter. Drella might still make an appearance in his later work and life, that sadomasochistic vampire art sponge, but Warhol eventually spent far too much time social climbing in the 1970s until he realized that he didn’t know how to either love or be loved. Post-shooting, he had a beautiful and kind live-in boyfriend named Jed Johnson, but that deteriorated because Warhol couldn’t give Johnson the affection he craved, and they couldn’t really be a public couple because of the times they lived in.

He was so smart and advanced about so many things, and aggressive in a nearly Boys in the Band-like way when he wasn’t playing the art freak and dumb blond for the squares. But when Warhol pursued a closeted Paramount executive named Jon Gould in the 1980s, his writing about that in his diary makes him sound emotionally immature, like someone who is trapped but can’t think his way free of the trap.

Warhol died in 1987 after gallbladder surgery, which he had put off for many years out of fear, and he was right; his body just couldn’t take any more invasion. The prices for his art, if not his films, immediately went up, and in 2022 his Marilyn Monroe paintings sold for 195 million dollars, an outlandish figure that cannot touch Julia Warhola and her odd son Andy as they go around trying to sell her tin can flower sculptures. That outsider art of hers, which did influence her son’s always-questionable art, has given way to the so-called “business art” Warhol spoke of in the 1970s, a concept he could never quite go all-out for because he remembered poverty.

Warhol would say he loved money, yet he was nearly always constitutionally unable to make any decision artistically that would get him any easy money. Toward the end of his life, he spoke of wanting to do an exhibit called The Worst of Andy Warhol in which he would expose all of his worst art concepts that had gone nowhere, which is a typical Warhol idea because it armors him from criticism, from humanism, and from hope. He had his share of negative feedback, even or especially from his own circle. “The motherfucker’s got absolutely no talent,” said superstar Joe Dallesandro. “No original idea in his head.” To which Warhol might have agreed and said, “That’s the point,” but of course if you have to keep saying that it sounds increasingly hollow.

More serious was a condemnation from a drunken Willem de Kooning at a late-60s party: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter,” he said. That “even” final point of his feels crucial. There is sometimes humor in Warhol’s work, but it is always nasty, sadistic. Yes, it’s funny, in a way, when a lengthy commercial for a hair permanent delivered by an incredibly obnoxious female spokesperson gets repeated in its entirety in Soap Opera (1964), a part-talkie. Getting through this commercial once is a trial, but then being made to sit through the whole thing again almost immediately afterward is a stroke of evil genius, it must be admitted. The religious defense might be that Warhol does believe in things like evil. But it’s one thing to observe evil. It is another to be a sort of instrument of it in order to assert control.

I often dislike Warhol’s work, and I usually recoil from his films, particularly after his superstars started to talk. (There are exceptions to that: Viva is riveting in the first half-hour monologue of The Nude Restaurant {1967}, and she’s just as compelling and hilarious today on Facebook, where several former Warhol superstars still hold court.) But I see why Warhol needs to be dealt with, or wrestled with. He was a nihilist, basically, in his 1960s heyday, with an edge of nastiness, but somewhere deep down, in the place where his childhood and young adulthood occurred, there was something more conventional, a real need for religion, a real love of movie stars, a lust for sex. That’s what led him to take up a modeling career in middle age, even when his conservative employees at Interview magazine told Warhol that he was making a fool of himself.

Warhol was willing to be that fool, too. He wanted to be a star, and against all odds he achieved that, through some personal cost. In the art world, he has become the star of stars from the 20th century, eclipsing even Picasso. Warhol is the star artist for the early 21st century, too, because his chief instinct was to destroy to assert nothingness. He wanted to be Robert Rauschenberg and somehow get the better of him, but he also wanted to be a movie studio chief like MGM head Louis B. Mayer, whose last words were the Warholian, “Nothing matters…nothing matters.”