Our Kind of Movie ─ The Films of Andy Warhol

"We didn't think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; theywere a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just 'our kind of movie.'"--AndyWarhol

Andy Warhol was a remarkably prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100movies and nearly 500 of the film portraits known as Screen Tests. And yetrelatively little has been written about this body of work. Warhol withdrew his films fromcirculation in the early 1970s and it was only after his death in 1987 that they began to berestored and shown again. With "Our Kind of Movie" Douglas Crimpoffers the first single-authored book about the full range of Andy Warhol's films in fortyyears--and the first since the films were put back into circulation. In six essays, Crimp examinesindividual films, including Blow Job, Screen Test No. 2, and Warhol's cinematicmasterpiece The Chelsea Girls (perhaps the most commercially successfulavant-garde film of all time), as well as groups of films related thematically or otherwise--filmsof seductions in confined places, films with scenarios by Ridiculous Theater playwright RonaldTavel. Crimp argues that Warhol's films make visible new, queer forms of sociality. Crimp does notview these films as cinema-verite documents of Warhol's milieu, or as camera-abetted voyeurism, butrather as exemplifying Warhol's inventive cinema techniques, his collaborative working methods, andhis superstars' unique capabilities. Thus, if Warhol makes visible new social relations, Crimpwrites, that visibility is inextricable from his making a new kind of cinema. In "OurKind of Movie" Crimp shows how Warhol's films allow us to see against the grain--tosee differently and to see a different world, a world of difference.

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of On the Museum's Ruins and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, both published by the MIT Press.