By Matt Whitman
By September 1966, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam had escalated to over 200,000 soldiers. Bob Dylan had “gone electric” at Newport more than a year earlier and was nowhere to be found in Greenwich Village. “Acid” had not yet been made illegal and had gained popularity a few thousand miles away on the West Coast. And on September 15th of that year, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls made its very first screening in New York City.
The movement that we now refer to as “avant-garde” film, had already been alive and well in New York at the time. Yet, Chelsea Girls was significant in that it would become the first commercially successful film of this trajectory for Warhol.
With collaborator Paul Morrissey, Warhol gives us an uncut, deliberately difficult portrait of the lives, the egos, and the gossip that emanated from the now legendary Chelsea Hotel. Over the course of the film’s three hours, two channels and competing soundtracks, we meet figures such as Bridget Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, and a younger German singer Christa Päffgen—better known today by her adopted name: Nico. Shortly after the release of Chelsea Girls, she would be catapulted to greater fame during her time as a singer for (then only just gaining notoriety) The Velvet Underground.
The difficulty of the film comes, in part, from the absence of traditional editing. Very often, while shooting, the camera was allowed to simply film until emptied of unexposed negative. In this sense, it is the viewer who is asked to do the editing of the film, through the very acts of watching and listening. Moreover, the difficulty presents itself not only for the viewer, but for the projectionist as well. Included with the film are detailed instructions as to how the viewing of each sequential reel of film and audio track should be coordinated and presented. And yet, given the physical anomalies and human touch embedded in every presentation of the work—no one screening, no synchronization of the film’s two channels can ever be precisely the same. This exhibition of Chelsea Girls will remain true to this intention in the following of Warhol’s guidelines for its viewing—sure to be an experience unlike any other at Jefferson Market Library.
On September 15, 2016—exactly fifty years following the film’s premiere—Chelsea Girls will be shown, as Andy Warhol originally intended, on two 16mm projectors running side by side. This is not your average movie viewing experience—you can fully immerse yourself for the 210-minute runtime, or just pop in for a few minutes to check out what’s happening. Feel free to come early, or come late! We’ll start the screening at 8:30pm, and it we’ll finish at midnight. Doors open at 8:15pm. Sign up starting Thursday, September 1st.
Matt Whitman is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist based in New York City. He teaches at Parsons School of Design where he has served as a part-time faculty member for two years. He has hosted film screenings and led panel discussions at Jefferson Market since 2014 and previously taught the course Ephemeral New York, Ephemeral Image as part of the Library’s JMU series of courses.
