The Variation Surface

Until the advent of video, and later the DCP, the image existed materially, on cellulose-based reels running through the projector. A line of filmmakers such as Malcolm Le Grice, Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad engaged with cinema through an attention to the film strip and to the act of projection. They are filmmakers who worked with the circumstances and the physical means available to them; their operations arose from the awareness of these means. In the case of Andy Warhol’s films, the film strip is a surface of registration: frames in sequence that, through the fixed camera and the movements of light in a space, give rise to countless similar images that are never entirely identical. A process of variation, one that Warhol explores throughout his filmic body of work.

Empire (1965)

Sleep (1964) [black and white, silent, with a duration of roughly five hours and twenty-one minutes] grants the impression of one continuous event, even though the titular event was, in fact, looped several times, while the film was itself shot over the course of several months. This process of repetition—rooted in the stasis of the camera, the body's permanence and the uninterrupted succession of frames that it ceaselessly recorded—does not simply reproduce the same image, but instead generates an ongoing series of subtle variations in light, bodily position, texture, and movement in the film strip. It is precisely through this accumulation of near-identical images that a new perceptual mode is established, gradually familiarizing the spectator with each of the changes that follow. The first shot is an extreme close-up of John Giorno’s abdomen, a detail that becomes perceptible because the sleeper lies in a particular position, illuminated by light cast at a precise angle. The movement of his breathing, the activation of his diaphragm produce subtle deformations in the zone between light and shadow, causing the visible surfaces to alternately expand and contract. In some of these moments, the dark region occupies most of the body, and it is the cuts, which Warhol tried to conceal, that return to a clearer view of Giorno’s body moving, repeating the process once more. In a sense, the establishment of this process predicts a development later in the film, when the shots begin to shift angles constantly, and seem to be structured according to the composition of light and shadow, which is always subtly in motion. It would be mistaken to say that this film becomes more active; in truth, Warhol unequivocally reaffirms this process of variation at every moment. At the same time, the film is never truly in a state of sleepiness. Instead, it creates tension between the activity of Giorno and the inactivity of the viewer, turning the film’s cadence into an invitation to familiarize oneself with each small internal movement.

Warhol is known outside of cinema for his highly systematized mode of production, which allowed him to create countless variations of a work from a single source (a photograph or a painting, such as the Electric Chair series). However, it is cinema that most easily synthesises the logic of serial production: the camera is a machine that, at every moment, captures thousands of variations of light. Sleep is one example, but Outer and Inner Space (1966) [black and white, sound, both reels running thirty-three minutes] marks a further development in his exploration of serial image production. It is the first film in which Warhol uses the double-screen structure that he would become most known for Chealsea Girls (1966), already seeking to introduce the idea of multiplication to its fullest extent. The structure is simple: in split-screen display, two recordings of Edie Sedgwick (positioned on the right of both frames) talking to someone off-camera while, behind her, a television plays a videotape of herself in side profile, each videotape being shorter than the reels, so that their relationships are never stable, even in their duration. Altogether, there are four Edies on the screen, though only two were recorded, their multiplication arose from the filming of the television image and, then, the dual projection. The projection on the left side zooms out around the middle of the film; the right side, however, zooms in at the beginning, seemingly to obscure someone walking in the back of the dark room; this exchange occurs in such a way that each zoom reaches the point at which the opposite side begins. What emerges is an image divided within itself, in which multiplication ceases to produce sameness and instead casts light on a continuous play of differences.

This is how Warhol evokes one of his most beautiful ironies. The pre-recorded image of Edie’s face undergoes the oscillations of video: distortions and flicker effect, produced by the offset intervals of the monitor’s refresh rate and the camera’s shutter speed. Instead of synchronizing the images, Warhol produces four spaces that, while continuously recorded or played back, unfold in a continuous play of variation in which the faces are continually reconfigured by fluctuations of light and the video signal. Films are strips laden with a photosensitive emulsion, projected repeatedly in successive intervals to capture light; in Outer and Inner Space, however, this process is redirected toward a screen that is already modulating an image. When the camera is in stasis (and Warhol knows very well how to take advantage of this), it registers the countless modulations of a screen that is already in flux. In these films, the celluloid strip itself is foregrounded as a material to be worked upon.

Movements and repetitions in cinema are inseparable from their linear temporal unfolding, but this unfolding does not coincide with any real time: Sleep is not simply a recording that runs for five hours. Empire (1965) [black and white, silent, filmed for roughly six and a half hours and projected at 16 fps to a runtime of approximately eight hours and five minutes], consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building for the entirety of its runtime. Like Sleep, it is not concerned with real time, even though that is often one of the most common perspectives surrounding Warhol's films. Once one accepts that a major theme for Warhol is time, this brief account ceases to sufficiently encompass the specific temporal operations at stake, since it ignores that few (if any) films operate in real time. [Twenty-four frames per second remains a minimal sampling of reality compared to the continuous perceptual processing of the human body.] Even more so in some of Warhol’s works, where he does not seem to concern himself with time in the universe of the film, but precisely that of the viewer’s time: the time of perception, the time in which the wave/particle of light travels to the retina, displacing the film’s temporality from its represented world onto the conditions of its own perception.

Chelsea Girls [black-and-white/color, sound, with a runtime of roughly three and a half hours] is a film in which the double-screen juxtaposes shots from different recording sessions, bringing into view the differences, contradictions and mannerisms of the Chelsea Hotel’s residents, as if the recordings captured lives happening simultaneously within each room, while each side structures these differences and contradictions according to its own composition, extending and intensifying their effects. The camera balances a cadence between stasis and activity, seeking to reframe moments in which more assertive and interesting gestures occur, but also hesitating and avoiding “non-actions that disrupt the regularity of the space. There is an abundance of zooms, and Warhol, alongside Paul Morrissey, shows no hesitation in tracing the camera along the edges of these spaces.

Chelsea Girls (1966)

A similar approach to zoom and camera movement manifests in Lupe (1966) [color, sound, with a runtime of roughly seventy-two minutes; double-screen version with a runtime of thirty-six minutes], based on the final living moments of the Mexican-American actress Lupe Vélez. The film opens on a sleeping figure: that of Edie Sedgwick, playing the artist, lying on sumptuous cushions in a princess-like bedroom. We observe Lupe in silence until she awakens; only then is the frame changed with a zoom out (unlike Sleep, here the camera holds its position while the frame becomes mobile, seemingly in response to the character’s activity). She stretches as she wakes, smokes, speaks with someone on the phone, waits for Billy Name to trim her hair; all the while, Warhol conducts vertical and horizontal back-and-forth movements reminiscent of Michael Snow in 1969, filming the lines of the wall and the room while also taking the time to hold and reframe the actions taking place within a given area. It becomes clear that, for Warhol, any corner and space can serve as an object of genuine interest. The act of zooming, combined with back-and-forth movement, persists throughout the entire film; and near the end, with Lupe in a room full of ornaments, food and drink at hand, every moment one second closer to her death (which, in the single screen version, is already shown in earlier shots that are not exactly flashes, since their duration remains long enough for us to notice every detail of the space’s composition: a bathroom), the camera itself seems to be falling sick: the image falls and returns as if blinking, and circular movements begin to take effect as if orbiting a center that never settles. This same destabilization intensifies in the double-screen version of Lupe, where any sense of narrative chronology that existed in the single-screen version is now completely destroyed, as actions no longer unfold in sequence, so as to sustain even the minimal impression of linear progression, but are instead dispersed and rearticulated across two simultaneous temporal planes. Near the end, both screens present the same image—Lupe in the bathroom—yet this coincidence does not restore continuity; alignment occurs only with the suspension of progression.

This constitutes another mode of developing meaning through the double-screen. The contrast is no longer solely spatial, gestural, or based on color or texture, but rather it serves to fragment these aspects temporally. In this sense, these films operate similarly to a technique of superimposition, which allows images from different spaces and times to coexist within a single screen. However, instead of layering one image over another, Warhol separates them, thus emphasizing both their similarities and their divergences to equal degrees.

But if anything unites Outer and Inner Space and Chelsea Girls, it is the way that they propose to be seen. Because of the split screen, it is simply impossible for the spectator to establish a single point of focus between the two sides, since each possesses its own rhythm and a distinct composition (even if more subtly, as in Outer and Inner Space). Thus, one must choose: to keep their eyes on a general perspective, sacrificing attention to specific details; to maintain focus on one of the sides; or to selectively follow the most significant movements (of space, sound, color, and how these elements interact) occurring on each side. Consequently, a complete viewing of Warhol’s double-screen films must include all of these tactics.

Warhol, in addition to evoking a fetish for repetition and variation within cinema, also constructs a viewing experience in which each moment is constantly reconfigured through its relation to previous and subsequent images, as repetition no longer stabilizes the image but continuously produces subtle alterations. The films do not exhaust themselves; they gain density with each screening, accumulating perceptual layers upon every exposure to the eye. The time of the film strip passing through the projector, while the projector shutter opens for a fraction of a second, therefore becomes inscribed as an integral Warholian theme. These films do not function in real time but in each viewer’s perceptual time; they nonetheless manifest themselves through a real world, through compositions of light that come from the outside. In other words, as an outer and an inner space.

Outer and Inner Space (1966)

Poor Little Rich Girl (1965) [black and white, sound, running approximately sixty-six minutes], featuring Sedgwick and the voice of Chuck Wein, brings a different mode of repetition into play. Warhol initially shot two thirty-three-minute reels out of focus due to a defect in the camera’s lenses; after noticing the flaw, he decided to reshoot them following the same conceptual setup, this time with the camera in focus, ultimately choosing to include one of the out-of-focus reels in the final film, where it appears first. Originally the film was intended to be the first of a group of works that would follow the everyday life of Sedgwick. It begins with her face in an extreme close-up: her eyes are closed, and the image remains still for nearly three minutes while credits are spoken aloud. Unlike Lupe and The Chelsea Girls, the camera does not seem to be tracing the edges of the space, instead operating like a disorienting device: zooms are performed to track Edie’s presence, without ever anchoring her within a stable spatial logic, so that movement remains perceptually ungrounded. Such movements do not aim at practical clarity; in fact, as Edie’s body moves—when she tries to talk to someone on the phone, lights cigarettes, or simply gets up from her bed to perform some other action—the zooms produce long blurs and areas of white, gray, and black, these shades form contrasts between the different parts of her body and the furniture in the room. Even if a minimal sense of depth exists, the blur brings the focus to the surface of the image, as if excluding or attempting to exclude the depth of the frame. These blurred tonal regions—produced by the movement of Edie’s body and the surrounding furniture—recur throughout the zooms, forming shifting visual correspondences across the frame. A shoulder dissolves into the bed, a hand into its reflection in the mirror, parts of her body intermittently losing definition and reappearing as tonal fragments of other surfaces. These elements are continually broken apart and recomposed. Through shifts in density, contrast, and contour, space emerges as surface in continuous modulation. Something similar happens in the case of Empire: push-processing imbues the reels with pronounced grain, drawing attention to the film object’s material presence in projection, as if the focus, besides the Empire State Building itself, were its own surface. And it is not only in close-ups of Sedgwick’s body that these contrasting regions take shape: at a certain moment, when she is lying on a dark-colored couch, about to do a little exercise, while her legs move in a pedaling motion, Warhol frames the scene in such a way that the surfaces between body, furniture, and wall become entangled and are reduced to unstable luminous forms, both through the movement of the subject and through the movement of the intermittent zooms. What emerges, then, is not a stable representation of space or body, but a cinema of surfaces, in which depth is constantly undermined and replaced by a play of variations that are constantly reconfiguring themselves.

Poor Little Rich Girl features a single cut: the one that, halfway through the film, leads the spectator from the first to the second reel, the latter is filmed with lenses in focus. Both reels were shot in Sedgwick’s apartment; by the second reel, the space and dimensions of the room become easier to recognize, allowing for a more accurate notion of what each piece of furniture is and where it is positioned. The film suggests repetition more directly and simply through the second reel as a repetition of the first under altered conditions. In contrast to Outer and Inner Space, Chelsea Girls, or Lupe, where the double-screen structure alludes to practical multiplications, what permeates Poor Little Rich Girl is a sense of a serial superimposition. The same room and the same Edie are far from merely repeating the previous reel frame by frame; instead, it is one of the films that most freely explores variations that do not rely on a previously established gesture, since, even in moments of relative stasis, the process of variation and repetition can stabilize framing and space while remaining a constant in the ever-changing nature of the other elements. The second reel, therefore, is far from assuming any aspect of “correction”, since the first reel was also re-shot; rather, it seems to inquire into the very extent of the material procedure of variation itself, stretching it across a full thirty-three minutes of composition. The cut that separates the two reels stages a tension between likeness and difference: although the same space and figure reappear, they do so under altered visual conditions and in a temporal progression, making their resemblance inseparable from their difference.

When a filmmaker works at the level of the image, that is, within the relations of correspondence and visual perception, they must acquire a certain sensitivity toward what connects between the things. In dozens of Warhol’s films nothing is said; in others, the sound seems to work fine and is an active and significant aspect of the composition. Yet, his works reach a particular degree of sophistication precisely in the films in which sound resists any type of clarity: a kind of non-comprehension comparable to a blurring. The texture of the voices and their form are still present, but its contours are, indeed, rather vague. The words spoken by Sedgwick, or Chuck Wein, or even Taylor Mead, often are not central: they are so diffuse, so muffled, that they acquire a degree of uselessness. But this uselessness, beyond its lack of clarity, may also serve as an aid to meaning, as in Outer and Inner Space, where the confusion created by four Edie's speaking at once only expands the multiplicative effect, as well as the superficiality of the subjects she refers to. In moments when words flow less in cadence, it is as if they were no longer fixed to something and, once this fixation is suspended, they are allowed to accompany the images in another way: as sounds that follow what the spectator sees, sometimes aligning with the images, sometimes drifting apart, and thereby establishing shifting relations that contribute to the overall structure. In fact, the almost inaudible condition of these films contributes to external sounds being evoked in the attention of anyone in the movie theater: it becomes possible to notice the noises of a projector, a fly, or a slight cough that could go unnoticed before when the focus was directed exclusively at understanding dialogues or monologues. In other words these noises not only associate themselves aesthetically but function as constant reminders that one is in the presence of a very specific film, one that is grounded in its own material conditions.

Likewise, Warhol’s work consistently demonstrates an attention to detail, in which even the smallest elements are significant. Henry Geldzahler (1964) [black-and-white, silent, with a runtime of approximately ninety-nine minutes at 16 fps], shot the day after Empire (using its remaining film stock), belongs to the same atmosphere of attentive observation that Warhol pursued in the mid-1960s. Among his lesser-discussed works, it is notable for the way repetition organizes the film’s structure. Filmed for nearly sixty-seven minutes with a mostly static (there is an almost imperceptible tremor), off-center camera, Warhol captures Henry Geldzahler, curator and art historian, stretched out on a sofa as he smokes cigarettes, puts on and removes his glasses (apparently with dark filters), plays with his hands, and tries out different positions for lying down—indeed, as Geldzahler later recalled, over the course of the shoot he ended up exhausting his entire repertoire of gestures. The immobile framing and the inactivity of the camera (according to Geldzahler, Warhol was absent during the filming) only allow for changes to occur within the frame, and what changes within the frame is nothing else but the curator’s body. Even light, positioned from above and slightly shifted to the left of the image, remains the same (not to be confused with the periodic shifts in exposure). Thus, any modification in the shadows arises only from the small space between Geldzahler’s chest and the sofa’s fabric, or from the way his head and arms contrast against the rest of his body. The piece of furniture maintains its initial shape throughout; little of a background is seen, remaining unilluminated. Rather than simply recording a stable interior, the film seems to establish it through duration: as the nearly identical frames accumulate on the film strip, stability emerges as an effect of repetition itself. What appears as stillness is thus inseparable from the material conditions of the film, so that the space remains fundamentally unchanged, allowing even the slightest differences to emerge with greater intensity.

Haircut No.1 (1964)

Warhol, as an admirer of surfaces—faces, persons, objects whose exterior is all that we are allowed to see—bestows these objects and performers with the purpose of acting as surfaces for light, receiving and modulating it within the frame; at the same time, this logic extends to the film strip itself, which operates as the foundational surface upon which light becomes image. What appears is a surface traversed by light, one that constitutes the image while exposing the conditions of its visibility. Depth does not open behind the image, as in a classical perception of space, but is displaced onto the surface itself, emerging between what is recorded and the support that renders it visible. Haircut No. 1 (1964) [black and white, silent, with a runtime of roughly twenty-four minutes at 18 fps], filmed with Billy Name (who cut Sedgwick’s hair in Lupe), Fred Herko, John Daley, and James Waring, situates this interplay within a simple action: a haircut. The film is divided into 100 foot rolls, each shot from a different angle and illuminated by a distinct arrangement of light. As such the segments come to develop their own dynamics and operate as examinations of the luminosity within the given area. In one sequence of successive reels, a close framing isolates Name trimming Daley’s hair as Daley bends forward, revealing a light source behind his head; in the next, a more distant framing brings that source to the center of the image, set against the darker areas of his face; then, as the camera shifts position again, the source drops out of view, leaving Daley’s face in profile fully illuminated. The action remains minimal while light is revealed, repositioned within the frame, and then withdrawn from view; the haircut persists only as its appearance is continually reconfigured on the surface, never settling into a fixed image.

So we reach the essence. What is at stake in Warhol’s cinema, then, is the film strip’s registration of a field already in constant flux, where the image unfolds as it is continually called into view. The means come into relief while what we see is flattened: no longer a window onto depth but a surface of ongoing variation.