Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.