The Chelsea Girls (1966) 195m
The best thing that came out of this gabfest was the title song recorded as
an afterthought by Nico the following year on her debut album. Making good
with his statement about everybody in the future having fifteen minutes of
fame, Andy Warhol placed a camera in various rooms (some in NY's Chelsea
Hotel) and had a bunch of his friends do or say whatever they could think of
until it ran out of film (his excuse: he was commissioned to do it). Could
have been a good idea, if any of them had talent or even the inclination to
participate. As it is they mostly rag on one another, mutter, scream, sneer
or just clam up (their excuse: they were high), giving the proceedings about
as much impact as a videotape of your relatives in the kitchen, unless you
describe 'impact' as attrition by three hours of split-screen ranting.
If some unknown schmuck had made this movie it would have barely earned a
second glance, but because it's Warhol it has seen much discussion. It's
art! It's anti-art! It's voyeurism! Art as voyeurism! Social
documentation! Snapshots of the underground drug scene! A redefining of
film aesthetics! How about just another Warhol put-on? I can't believe the
eulogizing this film has generated - as if nobody had ever before thought of
turning a camera on someone and letting it roll uninterrupted; as if the
minimalism of the enterprise was supposed to be a spit in the eye of cinema
hegemony; as if these voices from the margins had never been heard before.
I'm all for independent film, but it bugs me that anti-projects such as this
come built-in with their own failsafe, i.e. if they lie beyond conventional
cinema boundaries then they lie beyond critical ones. For example, it could
be argued that the voices in CHELSEA GIRLS have nothing to say (as
raconteurs, quite simply, they suck); however the rebuttal is that the very
point of the film is that no-one has anything to say, or if they do, that
they are incapable of articulating it. Well, I've spread baloney as thin as
the next guy in a number of academic discourses and I always circle back to
Orwell's comment that there are some things so absurd that only an
intellectual could believe them. Warhol may have made his name as an artist
but in time he became more famous simply for being famous, confounding
critics who weren't sure how to separate the contexts of art and celebrity.
The creation and reception of CHELSEA GIRLS has far more to say about fame
than it has about film. On those grounds, at least, it is significant.
As unwieldy as CHELSEA GIRLS may be it attracted a much larger audience than
other films of the avant-garde, although I suspect it was the novelty of the
simultaneous projection that caught people's attention. One theory behind
the split-screen gimmick was that if you found one frame boring then you
could look at the other instead. Good idea, but it doesn't take into
account that usually both frames are boring, lending credence to the second
theory that it was to reduce the film's six-hour running time by half.
Warhol's directorial style (a paradoxical term, as his style was to offer no
direction) was the basis for all his early improvisational films, but is
wasted here on a largely talentless collection of Factory cohorts (or
Factory rejects). When left to improvise, the subjects largely repeat the
comments of others, who in turn keep rewording their own statements ad
nauseum. After twelve reels of talking heads there's still nothing as
memorable as the moment in WOMEN IN REVOLT where a man's pubic hair
accidentally catches alight after a girl throws a match at him. But if
watching some guy talk about sweat for ten minutes turns you on, then by all
means, check it out.
sburridge@hotmail.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 37463 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1268282 X-RT-TitleID: 10003950 X-RT-AuthorID: 1305
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews