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.
Warhol had long been interested in film, and once he achieved success with his Pop Art paintings, he began producing experimental films at his studio, The Factory, financing his filmmaking with the income from his art. In 1962, Warhol attended the premiere of the static composition by La Monte Young called Trio for Strings and subsequently created his famous series of static films. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the premiere, claimed Warhol's static films were directly inspired by that performance.
In 1963, Warhol 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." The Village Voice hailed Warhol as one of New York's "most exciting" filmmakers. 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. During this period, Warhol filmed his Screen Tests, which were taken between 1964 and 1966, featuring candid shots of various people. The subjects are both frequenters and new visitors to the Factory; some anonymous and others well-known. Warhol requested each of them to pose for silent, black-and-white, 100-foot rolls of film to be shot by his stationary 16mm Bolex movie camera.
In 1965, Warhol met Paul Morrissey and they collaborated on several films, including My Hustler (1965), ' (1966), Chelsea Girls (1966), and I, a Man (1967). Warhol's films featured his "superstars," who were personalities who were part of his Factory scene, such as Taylor Mead, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, International Velvet, and Viva. Warhol provided funding for his underground films in the 1960s, but because the films weren't very profitable the actors received little to no compensation. Instead, he would treat them to meals at Max's Kansas City where he traded art for credit at the restaurant. "We felt fortunate to collaborate with Andy," said Bibbe Hansen. "We lived to serve the work. Just to have access to a theater, a stage or a camera, lights and film that was a gift and allowed us to do our art."
Warhol's films didn't have a script, and he would encourage the actors to improvise dialogue. "Mostly I just turn on the camera, I select the people who are going to be in the film and they turn on for the camera. We tried scripts, but the people did just as badly after 40 rehearsals. So now they just do what they want to do," he said in 1968. He elaborated in his memoir POPism: The Warhol '60s (1980): "What I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment. I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and talk about what they usually talked about and I'd film them for a certain length of time and that would be the movie."
In 1967, Warhol and Morrissey began filming outdoors and in color, starting with Imitation of Christ (1967), which was filmed in California. They filmed Lonesome Cowboys (1968) in Arizona and San Diego Surf (1968) in California. As Warhol was recovering from an assassination attempt during the summer of 1968, Morrissey made his directorial debut with Flesh (1968).
Warhol commented on mainstream America through his art while disregarding its conservative social views. A number of his work filmed at the Factory featured nudity, graphic sexuality, drug use, same-sex relations, and transgender characters in much greater proportion than what was being shown in mainstream cinema. Warhol used footage of sexual acts between his friends in his work, such as in Blue Movie (1969). The film, starring Viva and Louis Waldon, was the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive a wide theatrical release in the United States.
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 proceeded with the films Trash (1970), Women in Revolt (1971), and Heat (1972). Their next film L'Amour (1972) was made 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.
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.