Rob Christopher

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:07:03 -0600

Yeah, people should definitely not expect anything like Buster Keaton or Kaurismaki ... Warhol's "jokes" and "gags" function completely apart from narrative, and they don't "build" either. In my view they're more more of the laugh-because-you're-uncomfortable variety. He takes his choice of limited components to such extremes of endurance and repetition that you (or should I say I) can't help but laugh. It's a really weird sense of humor, which as you point out is tangled up in beauty, cruelty, sensuality, and even boredom; but who would want Warhol any other way? href="http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/blow_job/">An essay on "Blow Job" I really like sums it up better than I can.

Jason Guthartz

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:50:35 -0600

Warhol is definitely one of the great filmmakers, but I'm surprised to read your description of his films as "deadpan comedies". Beautiful, cruel, sensual, cool, subversive - yes (and intensely so). Perhaps absurd at times, and occasionally humorous. But "deadpan comedy"? I don't see it. In fact, many of his films *are* of the camera-nailed-to-floor variety (specifically his early, silent works, e.g., "Eat", "Kiss," "Couch") -- which isn't to say those films are boring, but they're not exactly action-packed. As Fred Camper says of "Sleep": Because of the film’s slow pace the viewer becomes more aware of and active in the viewing process, the way the eyes’ and mind’s wanderings might alter the object. Sometimes one has to make an effort to maintain one’s attention when there seems to be little action on the screen. But this is what modernist art at its best usually does: it gives the viewer a significant role in a work’s completion. Some works do it by creating puzzles of meaning that have to be unscrambled, others through images whose contradictions can’t be immediately resolved; Warhol does it, in part, by asking us to look at static images for a very long time, longer than most would at a painting, and encouraging us—without manipulation or compulsion—to notice particular things about them. I have not seen the two films you use as examples, "Blow Job" and "Lonesome Cowboys," but I'd be curious to hear more about the films you've seen and why you call them "deadpan comedies". I don't want to discourage anyone from going to see these films, but I don't think people should expect anything along the lines of Buster Keaton or Aki Kaurismaki.

Chicagoist: Perversion, Diversion

Rob Christopher

Jason Guthartz