Thirteen, because Warhol had sometimes screened his films around the number: 13 Most Beautiful Girls and 13 Most Beautiful Boys, for example. Each Screen Test plays back at just over four minutes-the perfect length for a song.īen Harrison, Associate Curator for Performance at the museum, suggested that we select and write songs for 13 Screen Tests-the choice of subjects would be ours. At the slower speed, expressions and emotions are magnified and the films become eerie. Each Screen Test is the exact duration of a reel of film, approximately three minutes, but Warhol’s clever stroke was to film at 24 frames per second and to screen the films in slow-motion, at 16 frames. They were lit with a single light, and Warhol filmed them with his unmoving 16mm Bolex camera. Subjects-some famous, some brought in off the street-visited the Factory and posed for the camera. At first Warhol called these films “stillies” and Callie Angell suggests in Andy Warhol Screen Tests that they can be seen as an extension of his earlier photo-booth portraits. “Screen test” is a misnomer for what Warhol was doing the subjects were not really being tested for anything. Warhol barely knew how to operate the camera, refused to move it while shooting, and was uninterested in editing, preferring to use whole reels of film.

Certain underground filmmakers were not pleased. Steven Watson, in Factory Made, recounts how in 1964 Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture magazine bestowed upon Warhol their annual award (an honor previously given to John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage, and Robert Frank). This was a small taste of the hostility towards Warhol that I had, before recently, only read about. His reputation has been kept alive by two or three collectors.” With that, he left to help himself to a plate of paella. “Warhol was not a nice man,” he informed me. He asked what I was working on and I mentioned the Andy Warhol Screen Test project. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I found myself at a party, talking to the grandchild of an eminent American sculptor. Last year my wife Britta Phillips and I were asked by the Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to write and perform songs and a score for 3 of Warhol’s Screen Tests, the short, silent, black-and-white film portraits that Warhol made between 19, mostly at the (silver) Factory on East 47th Street.

Swimming underground by mary woronov