15 minutes of frame.

ANDY WARHOL SCREEN TESTS: THE FILMS OF ANDY WARHOL CATALOGUE RAISONNE, VOLUME I

BY CALLIE ANGELL

NEW YORK: HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC./WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 2006

320 pp./$60.00 (HB)

In 1970, Andy Warhol withdrew all of his films made between 1963 and 1968 from circulation, obscuring a critically important part of his career from the general public. Following his death in 1987, the Andy Warhol Foundation began a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in order to conserve and catalog all of the artist's film work so that the public could eventually become familiar with this aspect of his oeuvre. Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol by Callie Angell is the first of two volumes to be published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. It introduces Warhol as a filmmaker, breathing life back into the Factory of 1964, when Warhol began creating what eventually totaled 472 film portraits that consisted of stills, "shorts," and feature-length films.

Divided into five chapters with five appendices, this catalog breaks down the methodology that was used to thoroughly identify the person captured in each still, as well as the type of film that was used, the running-time of the portrait, the year it was made, and the notations that either Warhol or his colleague Gerard Malanga wrote upon the box used to store the film. The films in this vast collection of "stillies" were not referred to as "screen tests" until 1965. As indicated in the introduction, these film portraits were never used as test roles to determine who would be selected to perform in a specific film. Instead, Screen Tests was merely a nickname for Warhol's film project, which totaled thirty-two hours in length.

The inspiration to create film portraits evolved from a brochure that Warhol picked up at the New York City Police Department in 1963, depicting the thirteen most wanted criminals at that time. In fact, the first film portraits that Warhol made were titled The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, later followed by The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women, Six Months, and Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities. As pointed out by Angell, "The subjects' emotional and physiological responses to this ordeal are often the most riveting aspect of the Screen Tests, adding complex layers of psychological meaning to the visual images structured by the artist" (14). Using a silent 16mm Bolex movie camera, Warhol transformed the ubiquitous photographic portrait into a motion picture that often captured the subject sitting still while gazing into the camera for an average of three minutes. The light shining upon the sitter in each film was manipulated to create different illusions of depth that mimicked painted oil portraits.

While most of these pieces occurred spontaneously (depending on who happened to visit the Factory on a given day), the challenge of posing turned out to be too much of a challenge for some: "The few people who actually did succeed in not blinking for an entire three minutes under bright lights were usually reduced to reactive weeping by the ordeal; the tears welling up in their eyes and rolling down their cheeks destroy all illusion of still photography, while adding an interesting facade of emotionality to their portraits" (14). Warhol took this form of real-time modeling to an extreme, and it proved to be another avenue that allowed him to break down the formulas that create either fame or an individual's outward perception.

Confronted with more images than text, the reader of Screen Tests is able to learn about some of those who visited the Factory and shared an intimate, if not a collegial relationship, with the artist. Although not listed chronologically, the first two portraits are of Charles Aberg and Paul America, colleagues of Warhol who had also acted in two of his movies, Withering Sights (1966) and My Hustler (1965), respectively. Six Months, however, focuses on portraits of Warhol's boyfriend Philip Fagan. Shot over a ninety-six day period beginning on November 6, 1964, Warhol pieced together different guises of Fagan due in part to his personality and in part due to the angles of light that were cast over his face at each sitting. Angell identifies this piece as, "an extended portrait of Warhol's affections, in which the filmmaking process itself predetermines and insures the continuation of their relationship" (217). When run as a continuous, fourteen-hour loop, the 107 screen tests of Fagan give the impression that he has gradually aged throughout the duration of the project.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Other notables who appear in the book include John Ashbery, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, and Grace Glueck. This first volume of Warhol's screen tests is an invaluable source for anyone who is researching the personalities that belonged to the bohemian circles of the early 1960s. Moreover, this document reveals the degree to which Warhol served as a conduit for the intersection of poets, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, models, opera queens, speed addicts, celebrities, performers, and wealthy patrons who formed the core of the Factory.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.