‘Andy Warhol—A Documentary Film’
Two among the many iconic moments in Ric Burns’ ‘Andy Warhol—A Documentary Film’ stand out. In the first, with a none-too ironised pose of fawning adoration Viva expounds upon Andy’s ‘touch of divinity’, to which the artist mumbles, ‘fudge’. And in the second, a mix of psychedelic and stroboscopic light-effects play over the decade’s first Happening at St. Mark’s Dom on April 8, 1966, to music by Lou Reed and John Cale while roving Factory habitués inject dancers with amphetamines, the lot masterminded by Andy in the projection booth, a shadow in a silver wig.
Andy, the cool democratizer of art, and Andy, the arch manipulator whose court, in Gerard Malanga’s view, resembled Hitler’s: for four hours Burns pads that shadow with biographical flesh in an often gorgeous meld of Factory, archival, and news footage, interspersed with extended shots of Warhol’s paintings and numerous scenes from his films. The outline has been given before: the immigrant childhood in Pennsylvania, successful career as a commercial illustrator in fifties’ New York, the reinvention of art in the early sixties, filmmaking at the Factory, attempted assassination and its aftermath. But as Burns tells it, the tale is a slide into darkness, arrested only by Warhol’s surviving Valeries Solanas’s attempted assassination, after which he lived something of a half-life on borrowed time from God.
Burns gives Warhol’s affectless remove serious consideration. The distancing and fear of touch are accounted for as after-effects of a childhood bout of St. Vitus dance; similarly the Warholian stare, in particular its attention to the everyday, is presented as the result of enforced periods of childhood bedrest. Burns’ treatment is indebted to Wayne Koestenbaum’s excellent study of Warhol in