Haladyn 1

Empire of Boring: The Unbearable Duration of Andy Warhols Films

Julian Jason Haladyn
Published in Kinema: A Journal of Film and Audiovisual Media 35 (Spring
2011): 105-113.
Ive been quoted a lot as saying, I like boring things. Well I said it and I meant it. But
that does not mean Im not bored by them.
1
Warhols Meaninglessness
In his 1965 film Poor Little Rich Girl, Andy Warhol presents a motionless shot of Edie
Sedgwick engaged in a series of everyday activities talking on the telephone, modeling a new
coat, and the like the first 33-minutes of which is presented out of focus. Having watched a
number of Warhols films, this opening sequence of formless shapes and disembodied voices
stands out as the most difficult time I have spent attempting to watch a film. The difficulty
with viewing Warhols films in general stems from his employment of structuralist tactics,
specifically filming with a static camera, using long-takes and not editing the film. As A. L. Rees
states: Warhols laconic I just switch on the camera and walked away sums up his attack on
film as dream and metaphor.
2
In the case of Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol switched on the
camera and walked away, leaving the image out of focus until he changed reels, at which point
the focus was reinstated before he again walked away. Viewers may wish to read meaning into
this absence of focus interpreting this visible blur or blank as a representation of the
unattainable dream of cinema but Warhol actively undermines the possibility of believing that
this meaning is intentional or part of the purpose of the scene. Given his working process,
there is little doubt that this 33-minute blur of unfocused imagery is the result of a careless
accident, which Warhol chose to leave as part of the final film. Such acts represent another of
Warhols structuralist tactics, in which he turns towards the material aspect of film in order to
eliminate his own personal presence in the form of aesthetic and technical choices within the
work.
3
Through his working process, Warhol problematizes the experience of filmic temporality
by exaggerating viewers experiences of duration.
When I first viewed Poor Little Rich Girl at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto, the
restlessness throughout the theatre, particularly during the blurred opening reel, was palpable:
people were talking, moving in their seats, several individuals actually stood up and left. Even
among the devoted that stayed to witness the picture come into focus, an event punctuated by a
communal sigh, the duration of film was visibly trying. In fact, this is not an uncommon
response to watching a (whole) Warhol film. Jonas Mekas in Notes After Reseeing The Movies
of Andy Warhol recounts a similar response:
During the early years of the decade, the early period of Warhols film work, whenever I
went to a university, lecturing, I used to take one of Andys films, usually Eat. And
always the same thing used to happen. The film starts rolling, the audience sits quietly,
for a minute or two. The catcalls and crack remarks begin. In the fourth or fifth minute,
however, they begin to realize that I have no intention of stopping the film, and the
reports from the back lines reach the front lines, that the reel is big (45 minutes). The
most unsettling, however, is the fact that no amount of noise or cracks seems to do any
harm to the film! Its nonchalant, obstinate and dont-give-a-damn imperturbability on the
screen seems to reject or absorb anything you can throw at it. It almost grows stronger
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with every whistle. So the students begin to leave the auditorium. After ten minutes or so
the impatient ones leave or give up, others resign, and the rest of the show proceeds
quietly.
4
Applying Mekas description of the films to the artist himself, we might speculate that as a
filmmaker Warhols nonchalant, obstinate and dont-give-a-damn imperturbabilityseems to
reject or absorb anything you can throw at him. The only response left to viewers is either to
leave the film or resign oneself to enduring it. This idea of the viewer resigning her/himself
to watching a Warhol film points to the nature of the difficulty presented within these works a
difficulty that I believe is an extension of the repetitious activities that constitute his artistic
process in general. Namely, as Lars Svendsen states in A Philosophy of Boredom, Warhols
uncompromising insistence on meaninglessness.
5
Warhols economic or laconic processes and statements, such as the one quoted by Rees
earlier I just switch on the camera and walked away point to an increased need for
spectators of his work to leave their roles as passive viewers who sit and watch the images pass
them by, instead becoming active participants in making the film. Through his passive process of
filmmaking, Warhol dispels the viewers reliance upon the illusionism or fantasy of film by
allowing the camera to capture mechanically whatever is located in front of the apparatus
without further intervention on his part in the form of moving the camera, stopping or
repeating the shot, or even editing the final footage. In this manner, the viewer must participate
in the creation of the film through their act of investing time and meaning into Warhols
uncompromisingly meaningless movies. As Mekas states, whereas art and good entertainment
are supposed to shake you up, a Warhol film asks that it be shaken up; by you, filled up with
ideas, by you!
6
In other words, even though it is Warhol who frames the scene and films it with
the mechanical apparatus of the camera, it is the spectator of the film that must to fill it with
ideas and, more importantly, meaning. In an interview with Gretchen Berg, Warhol states: My
first films using the stationary objects weremade to help the audience get more acquainted
with themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world, but when you
see something that disturbs you, you get more involved with the people next to you.
7
Here
Warhol acknowledges the disturbance inherent in his films, which he directly opposes to the
fantasy world of the usual cinematic experience. He continues this opposition stating: You
could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies: you could eat and
drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and theyd still be there.
8
In this
manner, Warhol is establishing his movies as catalysts for experience and meaning be it
personal and/or interpersonal rather than as a source of experience and meaning in and of
themselves.
Warhols description of all the things that a viewer may engage in while watching his
movies recalls Mekas account of the screening of these films during his university lectures. I
would specifically like to call attention to his statement regarding the films nonchalant,
obstinate and dont-give-a-damn imperturbability on the screen seems to reject or absorb
anything you can throw at it.
9
Warhol appeared to be aware of this quality of his filmic work, as
evidenced by his statements to Berg, using the indifference of the medium as a model for his
own persona. If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my
paintings and films and me, and there I am. Theres nothing behind it, he tells Berg.
10
This is
another of Warhols laconic statements, one that again points to his insistence on a lack of
personal investment, interaction, and meaning in his working process. Like the consumer culture
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from which he appropriates much of the imagery, Warhol constructs himself and his artwork
which he presents as interchangeable as reducible to the meaningless surfaces they present.
This image of art and subjectivity in contemporary culture represents a harsh contrast to the
Romantic ideals of the early avant-garde. In fact, Svendsen argues that Warhols art returns to a
pre-Romantic paradigm of art, where expressiveness is not a relevant category. Warhols work
deals with the inner abstraction of things, with everything appearing as a flat echo of itself and
Warhol empowering their spiritual emptiness.
11
With both artist and artwork presented as flat
echoes of themselves, Warhols technique of cinematic passivity and indifference empowers the
viewer to take on the primary role in the creative act and produce the experience and meaning of
the film, which is meaningless without them.
Warhols Boredom
This brings us to an important question that is consistently overlooked: why people leave during
screenings of Warhols films? Given that his movies present only minimal action, it seems
unlikely that the difficulty facing viewers is one of interpretation or conceptual understanding; in
fact, I believe it is safe to say that most people who see Eat know the plot of the film if the
term plot can be applied in this case within the first minute or two of screening. Robert
Indiana is eating a mushroom, slowly. The duration of this act is further heightened by Warhols
choice to screen the film at 16 frames per second rather than 24 frames per second, a technique
that he uses in a number of his films.
12
Early Warhol movies emphasized the cinema as a
medium for experiencing time, rather than movement or event.
13
Warhol accomplishes this act
of emphasizing an experience of time by not allowing the movie to distract viewers through the
illusionism of filmic movement or narrative based events. Instead, viewers engage in a project of
endurance, in which the limits of viewing within the context of the cinema are tested. This
provocation is summed up by Patrice Petro in Aftershocks of the New as a refusal of the political
modernist aesthetics of distraction, sensory stimulation, and shock, for which she gives the
example of Warhols notoriously esoteric and nearly unwatchable early films: Eat (forty-five
minutes of a man eating a mushroom), Kiss (one close-up after another of people kissing), Sleep
(six hours of a man sleeping), and Empire (eight hours of the Empire State building).
14
Petro
frames her argument specifically in relation to an aesthetics of boredom, which I believe
provides a possible answer to the question at hand. Is it possible that viewers leave during
screenings of Warhols films because they are simply bored?
It is significant that virtually none of the major studies on Warhols films address the
issue of boredom, particularly because the concept of being bored seems so integral to his project
as an artist. According to Svendsen, Warhol is perhaps the person who takes furthest the
manifesto of decadence from Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde. He gained maximum benefit out
of displaying his own boredom, wearing it like an expensive piece of jewellery.
15
Yet, writers
actively avoid employing the term boredom, even when it is clear that the concept is being
hinted at or even used without using the word. For example, Mekas discusses the difficulty or
problem in these films, stating that the viewer is confronted with his own blank mind. Here is
cinema that doesnt manipulate him, doesnt use force on him: he himself, the viewer, has to
search, to ask questions, sometimes unconsciously, other times consciously, and still other times
by throwing objects at the screen.
16
But, what does it mean for a viewer to be confronted with
her/his own blank mind? Mekas frames this statement by pointing out that the film is not
manipulating or using force on the viewer and, reciprocally, that the viewer is placed in the
position of having to search, ask questions, and even respond physically to the screen
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presumably in an act of frustration. If we assume that the viewers own blank mind refers to a
state of boredom, in which the viewer is undistracted and therefore left with her/his own
thoughts, we can then explain why they search, ask questions, and even throwing objects at the
screen. The passivity of Warhols films engenders irritation because of their intentional lack of
visual and conceptual stimulation; the resulting experience can therefore be classified as
boredom. In this way, if we examine Mekas statement by equating the viewers own blank
mind with boredom, we witness the two alternatives that Warhol leaves us: first, viewers take
an active role in creating the film as a meaningful cultural object, either through the means
outlined by Mekas or by simply resigning to the experience, or second, they literally walk out
of the film.
As Petro states, an aesthetics of boredom retains the modernist impulse of provocation
and calculated assault. (How long must one watch and wait until something actually happens?
How much tedium can one possibly stand?) It nevertheless abandons the modernist fiction of the
self-contained aesthetic object, precisely by exploring the temporal and psychic structures of
perception itself.
17
By not entertaining viewers, Warhols films insightfully question the role
and position of the spectator in the apparatus of cinema, specifically in relation to the production
of personal meaning. The word boring is bound up with the word interesting, Svendsen
tells us, It is not until the advent of Romanticism towards the end of the eighteenth century that
the demand arises for life to be interesting, with the general claim that the self must realize
itself.
18
Avant-garde strategies have, especially in the twentieth century, increasingly opposed
the everyday desire for art to be entertaining or interesting, yet there has been a reluctance to
fully embrace the boring due to the perceived negative qualities of the state. In her text The
Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting? Frances Colpitt specifically in relation to the
repetitiveness of Warhols work states: Boredom necessarily describes the spectator's state of
mind rather than any characteristic of the object. The root of the problem is in the
unpreparedness of the audience, most of whom were not familiar with the theoretical concerns of
this highly conceptual art.
19
Given Warhols insistence that he just switched on the camera and
walked away, it is likely that he would agree that the boredom of viewers necessarily describes
their state of mind rather than any characteristic of the object since the object for Warhol is
just a surface. The surface of Warhols films test the depths of viewers, forcing them to abandon
the passivity that mainstream commercial cinema engenders in favor of an active viewing
position that challenges where the meaning of film is produced: in the cinematic apparatus, the
artist, or in the individual consciousness of the viewer.
There is a blatant dichotomy between the critical writing on Warhols films and the
experience of sitting through one; I believe this is an aftereffect of his filmic process, in which he
leaves it up to the viewer to create the experience and meaning of the work. Im interested in
audience reaction to my films, Warhol tells Berg, my films now will be experiments, in a
certain way, on testing their reactions.
20
If Warhol is correct and his films test audience
reactions, then the critical discussions of his work are traces of those reactions and therefore
grounded in personal experience and meaning. As Svendsen states: Warhol is beyond every
form of alienation, since alienation always contains an echo of something allegedly authentic.
21
In this manner, Warhols films as well as his artwork in general also test the limits of critical
reflection and artistic discourse, the textual results of which are all too often regarded as
authentic, self-contained aesthetic objects. This is why boredom offers such a useful conceptual
language to begin thinking about the fading of the historical event and the status of history in
twentieth-century representational forms. Indeed, similar to modernism and like gender,
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boredom is a term that appears fixed and yet whose meaning remains contested, open-ended,
always in flux.
22
And this is why boredom offers such a useful conceptual language to begin
thinking about Warhols films, because the act of being bored while viewing his cinematic
experiments facilitates the need for viewers to formulate their own experience and meaning out
of the imagery that he provides.

1
Andy Warhol (and Pat Hatchett), POPism: The Warhol 60s (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 50.
2
A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI Publishing, 2005), 69.
3
Ibid., 69.
4
Jonas Mekas, Notes After Reseeing The Movies of Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol Film
Factory, ed. Michael OPray (London: BFI Publishing, 1989), 40.
5
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 101.
6
Mekas, 39.
7
Gretchen Berg, Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol Film
Factory, ed. Michael OPray (London: BFI Publishing, 1989), 58.
8
Ibid., 58.
9
Mekas, 39.
10
Berg, 56.
11
Svendsen, 101.
12
Near the beginning of his text, Mekas dramatically retells the story of when he instructed Stan
Brakhage to sit down again and look at Eat and Sleep at 16 frames per second, after which he
recalls that he had never seen Stan so shaken up by another aesthetic world as he was that day
after watching the movies of Andy Warhol. Mekas, 29-30.
13
Gregory Battcock, Four Films by Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael
OPray (London: BFI Publishing, 1989), 42.
14
Patrice Petro, Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 2002), 68.
15
Svendsen, 106.
16
Mekas, 39. Although I am using this quote to reference the viewer in general, as either female
or male, I feel it is important to acknowledge the masculine language employed by Mekas in
defining the viewer of Warhols films, particularly in light of his consistent presentation of
women in these works. In the introduction to Andy Warhol Film Factory, the editor Michael
OPray points to the lack of a feminist perspective within the volume and states that there is still
much to say from a feminist point of view on Warhol. Michael OPray, Introduction, Andy
Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael OPray (London: BFI Publishing, 1989), 13. For a feminist
analysis of Warhols films, see Leanne Gilbertsons Andy Warhols Beauty #2: Demystifying
and Reabstracting the Feminine Mystique, Obliquely, Art Journal 62.1 (Spring 2003): 24-33.
17
Petro, 68.
18
Svendsen, 28.
19
Frances Colpitt, The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 43. 4 (Summer, 1985): 360.
20
Berg, 58.
21
Svendsen, 101.
22
Petro, 93.