"Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol

197 Pages·2012·4.99 MB·English

by  Douglas Crimp

“Our Kind Of MOvie”
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“Our Kind Of MOvie” The Films oF
Andy WArhol
Douglas Crimp
MIT Press
CaMbrIDge, MassaChuseTTs
LonDon, engLanD
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© 2012 Douglas Crimp
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form by any electronic or mechanical means
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crimp, Douglas.
“Our kind of movie” : the films of Andy Warhol / Douglas Crimp.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01729-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987. II. Title.
PN1998.3.W366C75 2012
700.92—dc23
2011034255

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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We DIDn’T ThInk of our MovIes as
unDergrounD or CoMMerCIaL
or arT or Porn; They Were a LITTLe of
aLL of Those, buT uLTIMaTeLy They
Were jusT “our kInD of MovIe.”
Andy WArhOl
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ConTenTs
PrefAce ix
faCe vaLue
1
aDDenDuM: Eating too Fast 16
MarIo MonTez, for shaMe
20
aDDenDuM: MoTher CaMP 38
CoMIng TogeTher To
sTay aParT
46
sPaCIous
68
MIsfITTIng TogeTher
96
MosT beauTIfuL
110
aDDenDuM: borIng CaMP 130
ePILogue: WarhoL’s TIMe
137
nOtes 147
index 163
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Preface
I conceived this book as a book, not as the collection of essays it turned out to be—a
consequence of the occasional way I almost always work. I had set out to write about
1960s New York City queer culture, the culture in which I happily immersed myself
when I came to the city after college toward the end of that decade. It was to be an
archaeology of a world for which I use the shorthand designation “the back room at
Max’s,” because the room at the back of Max’s Kansas City, an art bar on lower Park
Avenue near Union Square, was where I mixed with denizens of the underground film
and off-off-Broadway theater scene. Once I got down to writing, though, things took
their own course. First, the topic quickly changed to Andy Warhol’s films. I projected a
book about a milieu that was meant to include Warhol and the Factory, certainly, but also
a wide range of other underground filmmakers such as Jack Smith, the Kuchar broth-
ers, Ron Rice, and José Rodriguez Soltero, together with the Theater of the Ridiculous
in its different guises—the Play-House of the Ridiculous and the Ridiculous Theatrical
Company.1 But I began with an essay on Warhol’s early film Blow Job and in the process
discovered the full extent and richness of Warhol’s filmmaking, by itself much more than
a book could comprehend.
Like most of these essays, the one on Blow Job, “Face Value,” was written initially
as a lecture. In the summer of 1998, I met the future museum curator Adam Budak while
he was still studying at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He invited me to speak
there, and that invitation extended eventually to a tour of various Eastern European
venues, including the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Adam Mickiewicz
University in Poznan, and the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. A lecture on Blow Job posed
some difficulties in still very Catholic and queer-unfriendly Poland. My translator in
Warsaw, reproducing my talk successively, seemed to take unusually long to get each
paragraph into Polish, longer than the precision of English often necessitates when
rendered into another language. The audience grew more and more restive until finally
some of them began yelling at the translator. Since I don’t speak Polish, I didn’t under-
stand what was happening until I was told later by friends: The translator didn’t want to
use the colloquial expressions for “blow job,” “hustler,” and so forth; nor, it seems, did
he even want to use the clinical equivalents of “fellatio” and “male prostitute.” He attempted
to talk his way around such unsavory notions altogether. Of course, this completely
ruined my plainspoken prose and often made the sense of my talk incomprehensible, so
Preface ix
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