Peter Gidal,
Andy Warhol’s Blow Job.
London: Afterall Books, 2008.
ISBN: 1-846380-41-3
US$16.00 (pb)
112pp
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

During its most influential “Silver” period, Andy Warhol’s factory churned out a torrent of paintings, sculptures, and films – films that pretty much reinvented the cinema from the ground up. In this short book, filmmaker and critic Peter Gidal considers Warhol’s underground studio system, with its “superstars” and epic films such as Sleep (USA 1963-64), roughly 6 hours of poet John Giorno asleep; Kiss (USA 1963-64), described by Warhol’s right hand man during the era, Gerard Malanga, as “a lip-smacking revue” (Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 151) featuring gay and straight couples locked in passionate embrace for 50 minutes of running time, in three minute segments; Haircut (USA 1964), a 33 minute ode to Factory worker Billy Linich’s skill with a pair of scissors; Eat (USA 1964), 45 minutes of artist Robert Indiana eating a mushroom with Zen-like deliberation; and Empire (USA 1964), Warhol’s eight-hour consideration of the Empire State Building from dusk to dawn.

These are just a few of the movies that came out of Warhol’s silver covered studio in the early to late 1960s, as the filmmaker and artist copied the tranquil but insistent gaze of such cinema pioneers as the Lumière brothers, famous for their brief vignettes of everyday life at the turn of the 20th century. Warhol’s films are really an extension of his paintings; the multiple frames that make up a film mimic the serial repetition of Warhol’s paintings, in which a single image is often repeated, seemingly endlessly, until it becomes nearly an abstraction.

There are many, many other silent Warhol films made during this period, including several hundred Screen Tests (USA 1963-1966), a series of 3-minute films of nearly everyone who dropped by the Factory for a visit, but the most notorious of Warhol’s early films is undoubtedly Blow Job (USA 1964), a 36 minute silent film comprised almost entirely of a close-up of a young man’s face while fellatio is presumably performed upon him outside of the view of the camera. (Warhol would repeat this idea in his less successful sound film Eating Too Fast (USA 1966), a 70 minute remake of Blow Job.)

The audacity of the project is apparent from the outset; while one might argue that the film is a document of a sexual encounter, it is also a record of the human face during sex, forcing the viewer to examine the visage of the young man with searching intensity, and eschewing the mechanics of sex that a more conventional film might embrace. There’s simply no way that Blow Job can be described as pornography; it is first and foremost a document, the creation of an artist who built his career on the impassive gaze of the voyeur.

Gerard Malanga described Blow Job as documenting “a passionate matter handled with restraint and good taste” (FMC, 152), and while this is a brief but adequate description, it doesn’t begin to account for the intense power the film has, as its subject writhes in ecstasy for ten 100 ft. reels of film, each running about 4 minutes in length, with leader streakings intact between each reel somehow highlighting and intensifying the film’s distanced but undeniably erotic subject matter. Gidal’s book is a detailed examination of Warhol’s work, linking it to works by Duchamp and Velázquez, among other artists, and focusing on Warhol’s attention to detail in the composition, structure, and duration of the work, while also linking the film to Warhol’s preoccupation with death, a theme present in nearly all of his works, including such early paintings as 129 Die in Jet-Plane Crash(1962).

For Gidal, who is a structuralist filmmaker in his own right, and also someone who was a visitor to the Factory on more than one occasion, the triumph of Blow Job is its intense focus on the humanity of the sexual experience, coupled with the clinical distance of Warhol’s dispassionate gaze. It is also a project that could only have been accomplished using that most 20th century of mediums – film – with all of its inherent technical imperfections, clumsiness, and immediacy. As Gidal notes, during the running time of the film, the young man goes through a variety of emotions and poses; sometimes he looks directly at the camera, confronting the viewer, daring her/him to look, while at other times he looks bored by the whole process, almost unaware of the camera’s penetrating gaze; at still other times he seems lost in the throes of ecstasy.

The entire project is thus a carefully considered visual construct, which both embraces the gay milieu that Warhol’s studio operated in, and yet simultaneously “screens out” the viewer, so that only a minimal amount of information is imparted to the viewer. The mechanistic aspects of the work – the use of a small Bolex camera with an electric motor to power 100ft. of film through the camera in an uninterrupted clip – accentuates the conflict between life and death that centers the film. It might seem, superficially, that we are witnessing an act that takes an interminable length of time, especially “film time,” which is usually accelerated with the “boring parts” nearly edited out, that both the viewer and subject are frozen in time, but it is an event that can be repeated endlessly, a moment out of time that survives after the death of its maker, its protagonist, and will continue to exist after our own death.

Warhol’s later sound films, such as the sadomasochistic Vinyl (USA 1965), starring Gerard Malanga as a young juvenile delinquent on an anti-social rampage, My Hustler (USA 1966), in which Paul America stars as a young man beset on all sides by a variety of potential clients, and most spectacularly his multi-screen epic The Chelsea Girls (USA 1966), presenting a gallery of Factory superstars in a variety of scripted and/or documentary situations, all exist in a phantom zone of pleasure and/or pain within a vacuum; what we see on the screen is only a slice of existence, but it is a slice that will exist forever, for as long as recorded history continues. Now that Warhol’s films are all archived in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the images in Warhol’s films have achieved a deathly perfection, cleaned, reprinted, transferred to digital video for exhibition in some cases (particularly the Screen Tests series), pristine and existing outside of time.

In the first years of the 21st century, Warhol’s films seem simultaneously innocent and yet darkly foreboding; they recall a time when anyone with a camera and a new hundred dollars could make a film, a time when all the rules of cinema were being reinvented and reconsidered, and most of all, a time when cinema (and television) was the dominant visual discourse of the era. Now, in the digital era, we have lost some of the separation that makes Warhol’s films so poignant and serene; we don’t have the time to gaze upon the face of sexual desire for 36 minutes, it would seem.

Gidal himself points out that a recent screening of Blow Job at the National Film Theatre in London only 11 people showed up to see the film, but that the audience size was roughly the same as it had been during Gidal’s first viewing of the film some forty years ago (5). Yet there’s a difference; what once was scandalous and modern, known only to a few, has now become the artifact of a vanished age, the shared sarcophagus of visual memory. Warhol’s vision as an artist, both in film and photography, is bleak, desolate, and isolated; this film is evidence of that isolation, from both an emotional and aesthetic viewpoint.

The alienation of modern society is thus presaged by Warhol’s apparently effortless constructs, films that in fact reflected a great deal of care and consideration in their production. Gidal’s book is a richly textured, deeply felt consideration of not only Blow Job, but also Warhol’s work as a whole, putting both the film and its maker into context within our contemporary culture, while acknowledging the artist’s debt to the preeminent visual stylists of earlier generations and cultural eras. As such, it is a significant addition to the canon of work on Warhol’s melancholy films, and a remarkable accomplishment of critical and theoretical synthesis.

Wheeler Winston Dixon,
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA.

Works Cited

Gidal, Peter. Andy Warhol’s Blow Job. London: Afterall Books, 2008.
Filmmakers’ Cooperative (FMC) Catalogue Number 4. New York: New American Cinema Group, 1966.

Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009