American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol produced more than 600 films between 1963 and 1968, including short Screen Tests film portraits. His subsequent work with filmmaker Paul Morrissey guided the Warhol-branded films toward more mainstream success in the 1970s. Since 1984, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and worked to preserve, restore, exhibit, and distribute Warhol's underground films. In 2014, the MoMA began a project to digitize films previously unseen and to show them to the public.

History

Warhol had always been interested in films, and once he became successful as an artist with his pop art paintings, he started making underground films at his studio dubbed The Factory. In 1963, he experimented with single-frame cinematography, a stylistic method already used by a number of independent filmmakers. However, he quickly came to the conclusion that long takes were the opposite of what was conventional at the time, and he started producing "motionless" films such as Sleep (1964), over 5 hours of a man sleeping, and Empire (1965), an 8-hour view of the Empire State Building captured by a stationary camera. Speaking on his early films, Warhol stated that "people weren't supposed to see them as movies; they were only intended to be projected on the wall of a room so that you could take a look at them when you felt like it." For his early works, filmmaker Jonas Mekas presented Warhol with the Independent Film Award of 1964, which was "the underground's answer to Oscar." Mike McGrady of Newsday regarded Warhol as "the Cecil B. DeMille of the Off-Hollywood movie makers." Art critic David Bourdon wrote that "far from literal transcriptions of reality, Warhol's films are more inventive, artificial and art-directed than some of his admires would like to believe." In 1965, Warhol announced his retirement from painting to focus on filmmaking. His films didn't have a script and he would encourage the actors to improvise dialogue. In 1965, Warhol met Paul Morrissey and they collaborated on several films including My Hustler (1965), The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound (1966), Chelsea Girls (1966), I, a Man (1967), San Diego Surf (1968) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968). As Warhol was recovering from shot during the summer of 1968, Morrissey made his directorial debut with Flesh (1968). In 1969, Warhol traveled to Los Angeles to discuss a potential film contract with Columbia Pictures. A deal did not materialize so Warhol and Morrissey processed with the films Trash (1970), Women in Revolt (1971), and Heat (1972). L'Amour (1972) was filmed in Paris followed by Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) and Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974) filmed in Rome. Warhol's longtime partner Jed Johnson, who had worked with him and Morrissey on several films, directed his final production, Andy Warhol's Bad (1977). In the event that the film was a commercial success, they had planned to move to California; however, Warhol lost money and stopped producing films.

The Andy Warhol Film Project

Warhol discontinued the distribution of all of his experimental films in 1970. Years later, film scholar John Hanhardt, general editor of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1965, Volume 2 (2021), who was Curator and Head of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, proposed a collaborative project in which the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) would collaborate to preserve, restore, exhibit, distribute, and catalogue Warhol's filmography. Warhol's assistance was sought, and in 1984, he placed his original film materials on deposit at the MoMA, while the Whitney began fundamental research for the catalogue raisonné. The Whitney, MoMA, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Andy Warhol Museum collaborated on this project, which was known as the Andy Warhol Film Project.

List of films