Andy Warhol.

The Chelsea Girls,

1966. Black-and-white and
color 16 mm film with sound,
204 minutes in double screen.
Frame enlargement. Courtesy
The Andy Warhol Museum.
2012 The Andy Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, PA,
a museum of the Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved.
32

Performing Color: Mechanized

Painting, Multimedia Spectacle,
and Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls
STEPHEN MONTEIRO

When Andy Warhol was asked why he included four reels of color film in his
otherwise black-and-white hit underground feature The Chelsea Girls, he responded
glibly, I dont know. We got a little more money, I guess.1 Already pop arts leading figure and a mass media sensation when he made The Chelsea Girls in 1966,
Warhols earnings would have allowed him to shoot the entire 16 mm film on color
stock. At that time already three years into a rapidly rising film career that would
take a definitive turn with the international success of The Chelsea Girls, Warhol
had shot color film on a handful of occasions since his arrival in the New York
underground film world. With The Chelsea Girls, however, Warhol embarked on
an unprecedented exploration of colors plastic, discursive potential.
Hailed as The Sound of Music of the underground for its monumentality and box
office returns, The Chelsea Girls became Warhols first widely released commercial title and established fringe cinema as a genre for the mainstream marketplace,
an important step in the rise of American independent film.2 Despite this achievement, the implications of the films color ambivalence remained equivocaleven
dubiousto audiences and critics. In keeping with his laconic public persona,
Warhol never provided an adequate explanation for the chromatic singularity of
this film. Studying the color dynamics of The Chelsea Girls within Warhols wider
artistic production, however, offers possible responses while emphasizing the critical task of reevaluating Warhols entire creative output as a Gesamtkunstwerk of
postwar cultural production rather than a collection of loosely related activities.3
By examining the conceptual framework and material conditions of Warhols adjacent artistic practices, as well as the historical circumstances of the commercial
film industry, the unusual presence of polychromy in The Chelsea Girls can be
understood as a volatile confrontation with colors changing discursive role in
mass-produced visual culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Warhols
film yokes his serial coloration painting strategies and his live multimedia events
Grey Room 49, Fall 2012, pp. 3255. 2012 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

33

to the swift dulling of color consciousness in film spectatorship as Hollywood

strove toward exclusively color production in the mid-1960s. With one-third of
The Chelsea Girls shot on Kodak Kodachrome, the presence (and absence) of color
in Warhols film jeopardizes the aims and conventions of polychromatic cinema
at the historical moment when color productions were common for moviegoers,
yet black-and-white films had not entirely disappeared from theater screens.4
Through kinetic lighting effects and camera movement, The Chelsea Girls palette
stresses discrete, often saturated colors that verge toward distortion and abstraction,
even while recalling the additive processes employed in films earliest history.
Here color becomes a hypervisible agent, accentuating or occluding events or forms
in the visual field like a polychromatic screen descending between viewer and representational space, even though these color effects were created in the profilmic
environment of the moment of shooting.
Warhols use of color film before 1966 is inconsistent. He employed it within
the first few months of his moviemaking career, incorporating color stock into the
production of Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of . . . in October 1963. Alongside
the hundreds of black-and-white films he shot from 1963 to 1966 (most of them for
his Screen Tests series), he directed a handful of films in more or less straightforward, naturalistic color, including Mario Banana (1964), Paul Swan (1965), Since
(1965), Suicide (1965), Lupe (1965), and Mrs. Warhol (1966). In form, content, and
exhibition history The Chelsea Girls serves as the bridge between this phase of his
career and the later filmmaking by retaining traits of the predominantly black-andwhite, often silent, conceptually oriented films of this period while introducing
elements of the almost exclusively color, sound, narrative-driven commercial
features he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the stewardship of
collaborator Paul Morrissey.
Prior to The Chelsea Girls six weeks of sell-out bookings at the Film-Makers
Cinematheque in New York in the fall of 1966, Warhols films had rarely circulated
beyond brief runs at the Cinematheque (or its earlier incarnation, the Film-Makers
Cooperative), screenings at his Factory studio, and film society rentals. Those that
reached the publicincluding structuralist masterpieces such as Sleep (1963) and
Empire (1964)provoked, angered, and bewildered audiences and reviewers, such
that Warhol had gained considerable notoriety as a rising underground filmmaker
by the time he exhibited the three-and-a-half-hour, double-screen projection.
Within seven months of the September 15, 1966, premiere of The Chelsea Girls, the
$1,500$3,000 film had grossed over $130,000 from New York audiences alone.5
Benefiting from growing media coverage and public curiosity surrounding the
34

Grey Room 49

provocative and titillating themes of underground cinema, the film drew (often
exasperated) mainstream reviews, opened nationally, was distributed abroad, and
definitively established Warhol as a commercially viable director and producer of
independent features.6
Coming to Terms with Color
A fall 1966 Film Quarterly article by William Johnson titled Coming to Terms
with Color reflects critical uncertainty toward color filmmakinguncertainty
that was reaching its climax at the time of The Chelsea Girls release. Johnson cites
the pressing need for an aesthetics of film color because a majority of critically
respectable directors had already begun investigating its possibilities.7 [A] good
color film does not present a simple series of color effects but an intricate skein,
Johnson explains, and even an entire sequence may make little sense if the rest of
the film is ignored. The movement of colored objects or, alternately, the cameras
movement among stationary color objects can form the basis of striking effects,
he contends, and its use across scenes can permit color to enhance a film by ramifying and intertwining through time.8
The color reels of The Chelsea Girls plainly and resolutely reject these premises.
Through long, one-shot scenes incorporating repetitive camera motions and changing colored lights, their hues offer neither progression nor intertwining but instead
produce a dislocation and unraveling that mimics the seemingly random sequence
of the films twelve reels. Emphasizing confusion and inertia, these color effects
frustrate both the flow of visual information and the recognition of narrative
progression in the thin conceit of a voyeuristic glimpse into rooms at Manhattans
legendary bohemian flophouse, the Chelsea Hotel.
The films references to homosexuality, bestiality, and incest startled mainstream audiences as they watched several of Warhols Superstars shooting up,
dealing dope, tripping on acid, slapping, hitting, yelling, swearing, stripping off
their clothes, and engaging in mild sex play. The dual projection raises the possibility of these events occurring simultaneously in neighboring rooms. Warhol
suggested he had chosen two-screen projection simply to halve the films running
time, but he had turned to the format earlier in 1966 for Outer and Inner Space
his penetrating, half-hour feedback portrait of Edie Sedgwickand employed
double- (and even triple-) screen projection with Lupe (1965) and performances of
the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.9 The decision to extend this practice to The
Chelsea Girls elicited interest and objection, sparking (depending on the viewer)
either intriguing and unpredictable juxtapositions delineat[ing] another story,
Monteiro | Performing Color: Mechanized Painting, Multimedia Spectacle, and Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls

35

another interaction of characters or simply enabl[ing] both eyeballs to get bored

at once.10
The films twelve sceneseight in black-and-white and four in colorare
single takes running the 33-minute length of a reel.11 The two scenes of any pairing are staggered by about five minutes, permitting reel changes but also producing
slightly different viewing experiences from screening to screening. At any given
moment the audio on one projector is turned off to allow the other to be heard
clearly. Early ads describe The Chelsea Girls as the New Epic Film by Andy
Warhol . . . in color and black-and-white, and the intermittent, unpredictable, and
uneven presence of color confused critics, drawing a range of responses from
weighty assessments of its psychological, spiritual, or political import to brief,
quizzical asides.12 Art critic and Factory habitu Gregory Battcock tied the films
colors to the story of modern painting. Warhol has used exceptionally vivid and
travelogue-y color combinations, he explains in Art Journal. They have all been
seen before and parts of them are abstract, in a way similar to figurative AbstractExpressionist painting. He regretted, however, that Most of these movies are
somehow a little bland.13 Filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who distributed the film, found
in it an apocalyptic vision evoking the agony of the Vietnam War. Toward the end,
the film bursts into colornot the usual color-movie color but a dramatized,
exalted, screaming red color of terror, he explains.14 Village Voice critic Andrew
Sarris was befuddled by the films jazzy effects, including the color choices.
The color LSD frames dont work as hallucinations, he declares before concluding, Nonetheless a meaningful form and sensibility emerge through all the apparent arrogance and obfuscation.15 Even virulently hostile reviews note the effects
of color. Calling The Chelsea Girls boredom bingo and a shoddily-made film
which can out-gross the best of them, Chicago Tribune critic Clifford Terry still
remarks that Warhol creates some weirdly engrossing, surrealistic color effects
in the late reels.16
Despite the significance of color to these and other commentators, its place in
the film was not always clear during production. Much of the black-and-white
footage was shot specifically for the film, some of it in rooms of the Chelsea Hotel,
where several members of Warhols Factory crowd lived. The color reels were shot
at the Factory and elsewhere, with scripts and events that distance these scenes
from the films original concept.17 The black-and-white scenes depict characters
lying in beds, sitting on sofas, and standing in kitchens, while all but one color
scene present them in dark, empty, theater-like settings.
The color scenes in The Chelsea Girls do not merely employ color film stock to
36

Grey Room 49

capture the improvisational acting typical of Warhols sound films but also serve
as an additive act of polychromatic elements that synthesize and extend his crossmedia exploration of technology as a popular means of, and an ideological force
in, image production. For the most part, the color reels are less concerned with representing events in color than they are with producing color-events. Their presence recodes color as performance by establishing its independence from object
through the contrast between black-and-white and color, the introduction of stroboscopic lighting effects, and the overt, systematic incorporation of tinted filters and
screens in scenes shot in color. Ghostwriting for Warhol in Arts Magazine in
February 1967, Factory assistant Gerard Malanga describes the final effect:
Why do I use color and black & white? Color and black and white? That clashes.
GreatI mean color and black and white over another. I mean a color movie
over a black and white movie or a black & white movie over a color movie. I
mean, its just so fantastic it looks like Poltergeists over Poltergeists in different colors and patterns and intricate divisions.18
Reducing the function of color film stock to a series of such monochromatic and
two-color effects, The Chelsea Girls simultaneously revisits the coloring techniques of stenciling and tinting found in early commercial cinema and the deconstructive acts of isolation, repetition, and segmentation initiated in Warhols
silk-screen paintings from 1962 and in his structuralist films from 1963 and 1964.
The decision also extends from his entrance, early in 1966, into live multimedia
productionsmost notably, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable disc-flickateque
that united color lighting effects and slide and film projections with performances
by the Velvet Underground.19 This historical and aesthetic contextualization
clarifies colors function in the film while explaining the diverse and conflicting
reactions of contemporary viewers.
Chromatic Imbalance and Misalignment
The Chelsea Girls initial run at Mekass nonprofit Film-Makers Cinematheque
marked a period of experimentation, with the elimination and addition of reels as
well as improvised sequencing and pairings by the projectionist and members of
the Factory.20 However, Warhol and Mekas quickly settled on a standard sequence
that remains in place today, wherein the four color reels do not appear until the
second half of the film, placed among the last three screen pairings.21 After more
than an hour and a half of black-and-white scenes of Pope Ondine taking confession from Ingrid Superstar, singer Nico trimming her hair, Brigid Polk dealing
Monteiro | Performing Color: Mechanized Painting, Multimedia Spectacle, and Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls

37

Andy Warhol. The Chelsea Girls,

1966. Black-and-white and color
16 mm film with sound, 204
minutes in double screen.
Frame enlargement. Courtesy
The Andy Warhol Museum.
2012 The Andy Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, PA,
a museum of the Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved.

drugs, and Mary Woronov tormenting girls to tears as Hanoi Hannah, the first color
scene surprises the audience with a high contrast view of a bedroom full of colorful
objects and whose white back wall is decorated with painted figures.22 Avant-garde
filmmaker Marie Menken sits amid the clutter of the setting as haughty mother to
a compliant Gerard Malanga. Menken and Malanga share a brass bed to the left,
where she berates him and snaps a whip while he smokes, drinks, and files his
nails. His girlfriend, played by Mary Woronov, sits stoically and silently in the
corner at right.23 The three characters wear variations of black, white, and grey in
the overall white room, becoming a ground from which smaller, more colorful
objects pop out at the viewer. The scenes color composition is further enhanced
by the black-and-white scene accompanying it at right, where Ed Hood and Patrick
Fleming lounge in bed while Mario Montez, Angelina Pepper Davis, and Ingrid
Superstar attempt to flirt with them.24
One of two reels originally shot for a film titled The Gerard Malanga Story
(1966), this first color scene opens with a close-up on Menkens blotched, flaccid
face punctuated with sloppy blue eye-shadow and red lips. The camera slowly
pans right from Menken across Malanga to stop at the similarly made-up, but
sharp, features and brilliant chestnut hair of Woronov, before making a rapid pan
back to its original position. Amid jolting zooms and occasional tilts, the camera
keeps returning to these slow rightward pans followed by swift right-to-left
returns, occasionally pausing for several seconds on Woronovs frozen face, her
pale skin blending into the white of her shirt and the wall behind.25
Starting and ending this action on a made-up face reinforces the unnatural hues
of the scene by tying color presentation to systematic camera movement as another
applicative process in image construction. In the customary high contrast of
Kodachrome stock, which was known at the time for overbrilliance and the accentuation of saturated colors while compressing midrange hues, Woronovs painted
lips, powdered eyelids, arched black eyebrows, and shining hair hover on-screen
like discrete, solid forms free of contour and depth.26
The close-up of a carefully made-up face is not only a long-established
Hollywood trope but also a synecdoche for cinema itself. Peter Wollen notes that
on-set consultants for early Technicolor films would concentrate on the individual
elements of the face, keying to the hues of an actors eyes and lips.27 Hence color
was not treated as an ensemble but as a series of separate units of differing values.
Pushing contrast and eliminating tonal gradations to accentuate eyes, lips, and
hair, The Chelsea Girls first color scene recalls this history while building on the
politics of color promulgated in Warhols serial painting.
38

Grey Room 49

Sarris calls the unusual camera pans of the films initial color scene the traveling typewriter shot. What does it mean? he asks in his original Village Voice
review. Nothing that I can figure out.28 Yet the repeated path of the camera
builds the shot as an exercise in mechanized image production, resembling the
dulling, mindless efficiency of assembly line manufacturing. The slow push across
the scene, followed by a swift return, mimics the principal action in silk-screen
paintingwhat Warhol describes as its quick and chancy character. To produce
a silk screen, an inked squeegee is pushed firmly across the fabric of the frame
before being lifted away; the gesture is then repeated as soon as the frame has
been reset.29
Intermeshing the cameras repeated motion and the images discrete color fields
reconstructs the multistep printing process at the heart of Warhols painting,
where individually painted zones of pure color united by the overlaid stenciled
image produce hard edges and sharp color contrasts heightened by frequent misregistration.30 Chromatic imbalance and misalignment are fundamental to both
media in Warhols universe, separating color from objects as well as conventional
narrative connotations.31 His lurid portraits of Marilyn Monroe made in 1962 and
1964 present some of the best-known and most compelling examples of this
effect.32 In these paintings, as in the film scene, the viewer is confronted by the
inherent, if deliberately exaggerated, color distortions derived from mechanized,
photographically based image production. As Donald Judd remarks in a 1963
review of the Marilyn (and other) paintings, The best thing about Warhols work is
the color. The colors are often stained . . . and often black is stenciled over them,
which produces a peculiar quality.33
The Chelsea Girls standard projection sequence coupling the Malanga scene
with a black-and-white pendant accentuates color distortion. In its binary opposition it echoes Warhols multiple 1962 diptychs of Monroe in which the actresss
face is colored by hand on one panel while remaining in black and white on the
other. The colors of the one are enhanced perceptually and (perhaps) iconographically by their absence in the other, such that any meaning attributed to color in the
one is derived in part from the attendant lack of color in the other. David Bourdon
notes that in Marilyn Diptych (1962) Marilyns face varies from a crisp photoMonteiro | Performing Color: Mechanized Painting, Multimedia Spectacle, and Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls

39

graphic image to a black blur in the black-and-white panel, while the other panel
is a brightly colored panel, which is relatively garish because of the intense
hues.34 Many of Warhols paintings from this period could qualify as garish, but
the juxtaposition of possibilities noted by Bourdon within the painting process
intensifies ones perception of Warhols color choices.35 Perhaps drawing on this
experience, in 1964 Warhol shot color and black-and-white versions of Mario
Banana , a three-and-a-half-minute close-up of a supine Mario Montez peeling,
tonguing, throating, and eating a ripe banana. Although no evidence suggests
the two versions are meant to be screened simultaneously, the nearly identical
composition and action of the films situate them as a pair differentiated only by
the role of color. Like the paintings, the presence of Montezs white makeup and
red-painted lips in the color version is reinforced by their reduction to shades of
grey in the monochrome take.
Yvonne Rainer recognizes the critical function of the inside edge of the two
screens in The Chelsea Girls scene pairings. Writing in Arts Magazine in 1967,
Rainer explains,
More than any other part of the frame [it] contains the condensed imagery,
emphasizing how the image mashes up against the edge and is restrained
from spilling out. This is a familiar concept in painting, if somewhat unfashionable in that area at the moment. To see it visualized to such an extreme in
the cinema is a new experience.36
At one and the same time this shared, constantly changing edge (which in some
early projections would disappear altogether as the frames overlapped) separates
and contains each image while producing a magnetic pull between them that
delineates another story. To illustrate her point, Rainer returns to her impressions of the films first color reel, noting the juxtaposition of the moody purplish
nervous detail of the Malanga scene next to a corner of a static loaded bed.37
40

Grey Room 49

Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych,

1962. Acrylic, silk-screen ink,
pencil on canvas, 81 x 57 in.
(205.7 x 144.8 cm). The Tate
Gallery, London. The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.

An Evil Red Glow

In another important 1967 essay, Dragtime and Drugtime; or, Film la Warhol,
Parker Tyler describes Warhols Monroe paintings in terms that would not seem
out of place if he were instead describing what is found in the subsequent color
reels of The Chelsea Girls. The multiple Marilyn Monroes show the actresss head
in poster colors . . . but each of these images is subtly varied, he asserts, so that
we get very much what, if it were transposed to film, would be a series of frames
cut from a film sequence in which colored lights had been passed around
Marilyns head.38 Tyler further argues that Warhols color filmmaking converted
the red-and-white Campbells Soup color scheme into arbitrary psychedelic spectra, related to the fluent kaleidoscope of his Velvet Underground projector as it
appeared in Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances.39
If the Malanga scene sets this conversion in motion, two scene pairings constituting the films last hour complete the operation. Serving up a crescendo of color
in three of their four reels, these scenes more closely reflect the extraordinary
transmedia color experimentation Warhol undertook in 1966from painting to
film to live performanceas he shifted from pop art to Pop anything.40 The first
of the two pairs is all color, with blond dancer Eric Emerson tripping through a
low-lit, meandering soliloquy on sex, sweat, and bodily communion on the right
screen while a half dozen actors from the films other scenes (including Emerson)
squeeze together in a darkened space on the left screen as though in a theater box.41
From an initial contrast between cool color values on the left and warm values on
the right, the two scenes engage in a polychromatic duel as directed lighting begins
to flicker and flash on one side, then the other, and colors alternate screens through
gel changes. Emersons face throbs through rapid successions of red, blue, and
white thrown by a rotating wheel of gelsthe red light so intense it effaces his featureswhile the faces on the left screen are etched in profile by soft white light.
When a spotlight of rotating gels scans the crowd at left, Emerson appears at right
cleaved by opposing red and blue light before fragmenting into shards of shapes
under a dim strobe light. While the screen space initially appears compressed on
the left (because of the cropping of the crowd) and endless on the right (because of
the otherworldly darkness surrounding Emerson), the changing color, brightness,
and direction of lighting disrupt depth and arrangement in both spaces, an effect
further complicated by additional projections appearing at different moments in
the background of each scene.42 The scenes flare in and out of abstraction as bodies
emerge and take definition only to blow out in overexposure or dematerialize in a
confusion of shadows.
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41

The directed colored lighting forces a constant slippage between color and
object in these images. Like the poorly registered silk-screen paintings, some components detach themselves from the whole, while others are lost in it, creating
distortions that enhance or diminish on-screen objects and their actions. The experience of film dwindles to the basic properties of shifting forms, hues, and light
intensities.43
The apparent formal and narrative discord between the two scenes of this pair,
despite their similar color and lighting strategies, might discourage attempts to
assign inherited meanings to their chromatic effects. Yet Emersons scene remains
a magnet for intense commentary arguing the transmogrifying effectiveness of light
and color in conveying a characters psychological events. Even those reviews that
make scant reference to color in the film mention its use in Emersons trip.44 New
York Times reviewer Dan Sullivan calls it an evil red glow, and Newsweeks Jack
Kroll describes it as a colored stroboscopic limbo which makes [Emerson] look
like Man regressing to a primal homunculus. Filmmaker Paul Ronders review,
conversely, singles out the scene as the films best, with its long-haired boy, high
on something, lit in the heavy red and blue of psychedelic art, an opinion shared
by a Cornell student reviewer who deems it a beautiful and even moving hallucinogenic color sequence.45 Tyler recognizes the influence of the Exploding
Plastic Inevitable when he identifies sliding Velvet Underground lights [that] project the interior of an addicts trance, while Bourdon deems it [v]isually, the most
opulent episode of the film, praising Factory manager Billy Name and his wizardly
use of colored spotlights to evoke ever-changing psychedelic fantasies.46
These assessments gain further traction when matched against contemporary
accounts of drug-induced perceptual phenomena. In a 1967 essay titled Inner
Space: What the Trip Is All About, William Marshall and Gilbert W. Taylor detail
the hallucinogenic effects of psychotropics in ways uncannily similar to these
lighting schemes. In particular, Marshall and Taylor note the occurrence of
patterns and lattices that often seem to be superimposed on everything in the drugusers view.47 Emersons filmed trip bathes his seminaked body in such patterns.
Assigning equivalent narrative significance to the scenes colors and lights, however, requires the dismissal of similar effects in very different scenes, reinforcing
42

Grey Room 49

Andy Warhol. The Chelsea Girls,

1966. Black-and-white and
color 16 mm film with sound,
204 minutes in double screen.
Frame enlargement. Courtesy the
Andy Warhol Museum. 2012
The Andy Warhol Museum,
Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of
the Carnegie Institute. All rights
reserved.

Stephen Kochs observation that The Chelsea Girls is a work in which one must
incessantly choose to disregard something.48 This disregard is most striking in
reactions to the neighboring scene, where apparent boredom and inertia accompany Emersons supposed trip. Bourdon acknowledges the difference between
these two screen events, explaining that In contrast to the lurid psychedelic lighting [of Emersons scene], the situation is static.49 By shifting inexplicably from
lighting to action, Bourdons judgment ignores the similarity in lighting patterns
across the scenes, which complicates such neat correspondences between color and
psychological state in Emersons performance. Wayne Koestenbaum, unlike Bourdon,
detects a similar color and play of lights in both scenes but finds these effects
bewitching only in Emersons scene.50 Tyler notices the difference as well but
admits the limits of the effects in Emersons sequence when measured against the
use of light and color throughout the film. This sequence has quality, he attests,
but within the context of The Chelsea Girls it is only another form of Olympian
self-documentation.51 Only Douglas Crimps much later assessment of the film,
which emphasizes Warhols controlling hand in establishing the screening order
and audio cues, promotes the benefits of a sustained reading across the pair.
Better to enjoy Eric the way hed enjoy you: as one of many, Crimp declares in
reference to the implications of Emersons monologue. Look at both screensthe
play of colored lights, blue on this side, red on that, spotlit here, backlit there;
close-ups of Eric on both, a small one on the left mashed up against the edge, a
large one on the right, too large for the frame.52
The repetition of Emersons face across the two scenes, with similar red and
blue hues alternating between them, recalls Warhols serial portrait techniques of
repeated images in groupings of canvases. In particular, the effects observed during Emersons monologue bear a striking resemblance to the self-portrait series
Warhol began painting during the films production in the summer of 1966. Based
on a high-contrast, side-lit close-up photograph of the artist in pensive pose, these
seventy-seven large, silk-screen canvases break from Warhols previous efforts in
portraiture in their range of contrasting hues of varying chroma and brightness.53
Unlike the Marilyn canvases, Warhol avoided hand-applied color and black silkscreening. Instead, he stenciled three independent zones of up to three colors each,
then silk-screened over them with one or more overlapping colors. The results
announce a functional shift, according to Georg Frei and Neil Printz, where color
now advances, if only briefly, from supernumerary status to primary effect.54
Robert Rosenblum remarks that in these images meant to be shown individually
or in grids of multiples Warhols head seems to become an impersonal motif to be
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43

explored in almost abstract terms, with melting floods of colour and shadow, different in each work. Examining an instance of the effect in turquoise and lilac,
Rosenblum notes a diagonal split . . . that, like a sharp blade, cuts the three-quarter
view of the artists head in two, an abstract geometric pattern so imposing that it
does violence to the integrity of the face, separating the eye from the nose and the
mouth.55 The stark division between light and dark provided by the source image,
Warhols choice of differing chromatic schemesfrom nearly invisible to high
contrastand the unusual residue marks from overinking or uneven paint consistency all contribute to the dissolution of the head into a field of applied color.
In the most extreme examples, the head is lost entirely, leaving the viewer with
only perceptual events of depth distortion produced by color combination and the
craggy textures of excess paint, the material equivalents of the visual effects of
lighting in Emersons scene.
Static Violence
The films final pair of scenes further undermines the conventional psychological
readings of filmic light and color already compromised in the preceding color
reels. In The Chelsea Girls best-known scene, Ondine returns as Pope in a blackand-white reel, shooting up and exploding into a verbal and physical fury on the
right screen when his costar, Ronna Page, accuses him of being a phony.
Alongside Ondines histrionics, Velvet Underground singer Nico appears in a color
44

Grey Room 49

Andy Warhol. Self-Portrait, 1966.

Acrylic, silk-screen ink, and pencil
on linen, 22.5 x 22.5 in. each
(57.2 x 57.2 cm each). The
Museum of Modern Art, New
York, gift of Philip Johnson.
The Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

reel at left, crying gently. After five minutes, her tears stop and she calmly bides
the considerable time remaining until the reel runs out, at points toying with a
light meter or winding a spool of cellophane tape, two gestures that recall the basic
elements of filmmakinglight and filmstrip. This scene begins with natural
colors in an unfiltered, raking light that is supersededonce Nico stops crying
by tinted light that drowns her fair complexion and blonde hair in variations of
red, fuchsia, green, and blue. Additional light sources are added, projecting rotating screen patterns with gel filters across the scene in a kaleidoscopic chaos as the
camera embarks on frenetic zooms and extreme close-ups. In the closing minutes,
numerous zooms out to a medium shot reveal that the light patterns are the result
of projecting rapidly changing color slides onto Nico and the wall immediately
behind her.
The physical violence committed by Ondine on the right screen is reflected in
the ferocity of color and framing on the left. One could thus read the wide-ranging,
cluttered, and arrhythmic light-and-color schemes hitting Nico as representations
of a subject in stunned confusion. Such an interpretation would not only explain
her weeping and pensive inaction but also conform to the readings of light and
color in Emersons scene as representative of the depth of emotional experience
and the unifying, harmonizing effect of the hallucinatory trip. However, one could
also see these bewildering effects as exposing the striking German model and
singer as a fetish object placed before the viewers uninterrupted gaze. When the
layers of light patterns and changing colors flatten and fragment her, we become
aware that Nicos primary role in musical performances and film is as the surface
on which audience desire is projected. Accordingly, one reviewer, piqued by the
films technical gimmickry and crossing [of] all sexual boundaries, laments
that Stroboscopic color patterns are flashed at the conclusion of the picture across
the lovely face of Nikko [sic], a blond beauty who is Mr. Warhols lone concession
to heterosexual taste.56
Bourdon calls Nicos opening and closing scenes the most tedious hour of the
film. A succession of psychedelic colored lights and patterns play against her
face, he states of the final scene, but her expression [is] too frozen, vacant, and
monotonous for the motion-picture camera.57 What seems to perturb Bourdon
is not Nicos frozen gaze so much as the discordance between the impassive face
and the psychedelic patterns upon it, an eventuality that reduces light, color, and
actor to objects. Here colored lights may represent nothing more than colored
lights, delivering one of those moments that convinced Koch to remark that, like
earlier Warhol works, The Chelsea Girls is located . . . squarely in that arena
Monteiro | Performing Color: Mechanized Painting, Multimedia Spectacle, and Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls

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Right and opposite:

Andy Warhol. The Chelsea Girls,
1966. Black-and-white and
color 16 mm film with sound,
204 minutes in double screen.
Frame enlargement. Courtesy
the Andy Warhol Museum.
2012 The Andy Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, PA,
a museum of the Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved.

where perception stands witness to itself.58

Rather than represent the emotional states and subjectivity of the characters, as
color is regularly summoned to do in cinema, the projected color work of The
Chelsea Girls can impose states upon the actors. Steven Shaviro reasons that the
subjectivity displayed in these performances is always imposed from the outside:
it is unstable and supplemental, a mode of behavioristic reactivity, at best a shifting
pragmatic response to unavoidable social stimuli.59 Like the off-screen commands
and moments of actors addressing the crew that arise in this and other Warhol
films,60 the manipulation of color and light during shooting creates an imposition
on, and provocation of, the actor. Emersons protracted striptease, for example, may
be in response to the slowly changing stage lights. Nicos aloof stagnation may be her
method of surviving the onslaught of dazzling light effects executed by Billy Name.
Tinting, Stenciling, and Silk-Screening
In her Film Culture review of The Chelsea Girls, Susan Pile considers Nicos
appearance in the films first and last reels to be signs of an unfulfilled sensory
trajectory from the uncolored ennui of the first [black-and-white] frames, very real
in their representation . . . to the unreality of Nicos oblivion amid the garish patterns and weird music. For Pile, the effect would have been beautiful . . . if three
hours of paranoia had not interrupted the first peaceful frames from the last, frightening in their quiet.61 Piles frustration with the intervening film as interruption,
when read through her understanding of color, encapsulates the central problem
of chromatic meaning in The Chelsea Girls. Color as interruption and supplement
jeopardizes any interpretation of the film as an authentic social document,
although that claim has been raised.62 Warhol eagerly encouraged such perceptions
of verit around his work, claiming that he preferred long takes like those found in
The Chelsea Girls, because that way I can catch people being themselves.63 Yet
Warhols films more accurately reveal cinema being itself by wearing down the
conditions of illusory transparency. One such method of dispensing with the illusion is distorted audio reproduction, and Peter Gidal notes that The Chelsea Girls
low-fidelity, direct-sound recording bombards us with overbearing noise
throughout the film, leaving us forced to consider the visual because we have
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been so rudely confronted by the impossibility of deciphering aurally.64

Warhols performance of color in The Chelsea Girls provides competing noise
and points toward the second, opposing trajectory of this work. The barrage of
colors and light patterns that assault both actor and viewer in the films final
scenes is an aftershock of Warhols fracturing of screen and cinema a few months
earlier with the touring multimedia concert show Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
Premiering at the Polsky Dom Narodny in New York in April 1966, the Exploding
Plastic Inevitable included a battery of film and slide projectors that swept over
musicians, dancers, audience, and architecture in an assault of film images, colors,
and geometric patterns acoustically accompanied by pop recordings and the Velvet
Underground and Nico performing on stage.65 Billy Name describes the Exploding
Plastic Inevitable as multi-coloured fields of high contrast black-and-white film
with gelled filters, spinning colour wheels, oil and water and strobes.66 Others
note the influence of this multimedia show on The Chelsea Girls, most recognizably in Names mechanized light and color displays in the final reels.67 However,
this additive performance of color also relates to Warhols practice of tinting his
black-and-white films during shows. Id usually watch from the balcony or take
my turn at the projectors, Warhol explains in POPism, slipping different-colored
gelatin slides over the lenses and turning movies like Harlot, The Shoplifter,
Couch, Banana , Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, Kiss, Whips, Face, Camp, Eat into all
different colors.68 The cumulative effect, notes Branden W. Joseph, was one of
disruptive multiplicity and layering.69
In The Chelsea Girls, however, Warhol reins in these aggressive expanded cinema strategies by collapsing them back onto the theater screen and into the film
stock, draining and defusing selected elements of his multimedia environments
by returning them to the confines of the film frame. While that decision might be
deemed a conservative retreat to the hegemonic model of commercial cinema, it
offers new challenges to inherited concepts of colors relationship to movement in
cinema. At midcentury in Theory of the Film, Bla Balsz wrote, Colour in the
film has artistic significance only if it expresses some specifically filmic experience. For Balsz, the essence of that experience is motion. Decrying the urge to
create static pictorial effect, like a painting, he predicted that filming colours in
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movement, provided our technique is sensitive enough to record them and our
sensitivity sufficiently developed to absorb them, could open up a vast domain of
human experience which could not find expression in any other art.70 The quick,
disconcerting chromatic movements and shifts in The Chelsea Girls push this logic
to an extreme before the viewers eyes, repelling efforts to absorb them along
Balszs terms. Like the colored lights on screen, the viewer remains at the surface
of a sometimes impenetrable narrative. Rather than offering spatial or psychological depth, color flattens and obscures.
By 1966, technicians and viewers had seemingly mastered color, yet the abstract
effects of color and light in the last hour of The Chelsea Girlsbrought back to the
movie screen from the kinetic realm of the multimedia eventexpose the limits of
chromatic cinema. The effects pull the film in two directions that reaffirm the
divergent historical and ideological territories Warhol was mapping in his work at
that time. First, Warhols film excavates the history of color in filmmaking and
spectatorship. By shooting these scenes in dark spaces lit by projected color,
Warhol extends color brilliance and contrasts to extremes that reiterate the movie
theater experience of color from the 1930s through the 1950s, when saturated
colors were the norm for musicals and historical epics.71 By bathing scenes in
monochromeeven if only for a few momentsWarhol plunges ever deeper into
cinema history by recovering the effect, if not the technique, of early cinema film
tinting.72
Siegfried Kracauer argues in his Theory of Film that the uniform tinting of
scenes during the silent era united shots into meaningful units. [T]he application
of one and the same color to larger units of successive shots, Kracauer explains,
counteracted the . . . lack of coherence [of these sequences] in the wake of complete silence.73 The Chelsea Girls explores tinting not through lab processing but
by creating uniform one- or two-color fields during shooting. Rather than uniting a
succession of shots, its profilmic color shifts within scenes potentially segment
them, creating a montage of color.74 Kracauer warns that using tinting to unite
shots in early silent films succeeded only if the uniform red or blue was sufficiently discreet to let transpire the various meanings of the shots it overlaid.75
With the single-shot scenes of The Chelsea Girls, the issue is not whether color
allows meaning to transcend its presence but what changes in color can bring
to shots that seem particularly static and mute (at least by the standards of
conventional film language). This use of color can counteract the sense of the interminability experienced by some viewers.76
Tyler explores the role of temporality and its indicators in Warhols cinema in
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Dragtime and Drugtime, finding in The Chelsea Girls a slowing of film time that
heightens narrative potential. Tyler ties the experience directly to color effects.
Dragtime (the superficial tempo of Warhols primitive films) might be said to have
more than a mite to do with drugtime, he writes, and the magic beauties of an
expanded time assisted (as it is in The Chelsea Girls) with overt psychedelic
decor.77 In addition, the heightened use of patterns and grids placed over lighting sources in association with additive color schemes recalls the role stencils
played in the early years of cinema in the mass production of colorized film. This
corresponds as well with Warhols painting practices, where the silk screen and
stencil standardize forms for the application of color. These coloring techniques
not only reduced production time and costs for early film companies but also permit color to function without appearing laborious by eliminating the fluctuations
of the brushstroke. In their appearance in The Chelsea Girls, however, the rotating
patterns and grids signify manipulation, a hand behind the effect, creating a tension
between standardization and improvisation, between color as a physical property
and as an application. This returns us to Warhols paintings, recalling Thomas
Crows disconcerting remarks that Warhols alternation between black-and-white
and color depictions of Marilyn Monroe sets in opposition the vital authenticity
of the most real Monroe and the embalmed quality of Warhols coloring. There
is a deeper layer underneath the color, Crow explains, one that can change and
shift and that occasionally gets exposed, as it does in the Monroe diptych.78
These shifting relationships suggest that assessing the role of color in The
Chelsea Girls requires abandoning assumptions of narrative value to look instead
at the films place within technologies of representation. Warhols career-long
interest in exploring the basic elements of media and the shortcomings of their sign
systems runs through The Chelsea Girls. Making a color film, at least at this stage
in his career, meant both exploiting and subverting the basic industrial features of
material and medium. Color effects in The Chelsea Girls may appear to dehumanize characters, exteriorize a mental landscape or break scenes into narrative components, but the film paradoxically pushes further by falling short of creating a
coherent means of endowing the image with significance. Instead, The Chelsea
Girls wheels through any number of possibilities to force the viewer to question
not only what meanings color can produce but why it produces any at all.

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Notes

1. Joseph Gelmis, Andy Warhol, in Ill Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews,
19621987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 164. The interview was conducted in 1969.
2. On the comparison to The Sound of Music, see Vincent Canby, Chelsea Girls in Midtown
Test, New York Times, 1 December 1966, 56.
3. In this regard, consider Annette Michelson, Where Is Your Rupture?: Mass Culture and
Gesamtkunstwerk, October 56 (Spring 1991): 4263.
4. This situation would not last long. With all three American television networks converting to
color primetime programming in 19651966, Hollywood saw its sharpest one-year drop in blackand-white production. In 1967, the dwindling number of black-and-white feature film releases
forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to merge its color and black-and-white
categories for the Academy Award for best cinematography. By 1970, 94 percent of studio releases
were in color. See Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Oxford, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 48; and David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1990), 480.
5. Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins,
2009), 365.
6. After three two-week engagements at the Film-Makers Cinematheque from September to
November 1966, the film was distributed by the Film-Makers Distribution Center, opening at the
Cinema Rendezvous on December 1, moving to the Regency Theater a few days later, and eventually
ending up at the York Theater. Canby, Chelsea Girls in Midtown Test, 56; and Vincent Canby,
Coast Will See Warhols Film, New York Times, 19 January 1967, 35. The film premiered in Boston
on November 18 and by the start of June 1967 had played in Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans,
Washington, DC, and Paris. A British distribution deal was signed in April 1967 between the FilmMakers Distribution Center and Sherpix Inc. See advertisement, Boston Globe, 13 November 1966,
A63; Judge to See Chelsea Girls Today, Boston Globe, 1 June 1967, 4; and distribution agreement, in
Time Capsule 10, Warhol Archives, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.
7. William Johnson, Coming to Terms with Color, Film Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Fall 1966): 2.
8. Johnson, 1114.
9. Warhol also shot The Bed (1965) for double projection. See Callie Angell, Doubling the Screen:
Andy Warhols Outer and Inner Space, Millennium Film Journal 38 (Spring 2002): 1933; and
Douglas Crimp, Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012),
107108.
10. Yvonne Rainer, Dont Give the Game Away, Arts Magazine 41, no. 6 (April 1967): 45; and
Wilfrid Sheed, Films, Esquire 401 (April 1967): 48.
11. For easier identification, each reel has been assigned one or more titles over the years, including the following, listed in screening order: Nico in Kitchen, Father Ondine and Ingrid, Brigid Holds
Court (or The Duchess), Boys in Bed, Hanoi Hannah, Hanoi Hannah and Guests, Mario Sings Two
Songs (or The John), Marie Menken (or The Gerard Malanga Story), Eric Says All (or The Trip), Color

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Lights on Cast (or Their Town), Pope Ondine (or The Pope Ondine Story), Nico Crying. Because these
titles are indicative rather than definitive, they have been avoided here.
12. Scherman and Dalton, 345.
13. Gregory Battcock, Notes on The Chelsea Girls, Art Journal 26, no. 4 (Summer 1967): 364.
14. Mekas adds, [T]he terror and hardness that we see in Chelsea Girls is the same terror and
hardness that is burning Vietnam, and its the essence and blood of our culture, of our ways of living:
This is the Great Society. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal (1966), in The Village Voice Film Guide: 50
Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits, ed. Dennis Lim (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007),
6566. The review originally ran in The Village Voice, 29 September 1966.
15. Andrew Sarris, The Chelsea Girls (1966), in Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: On the
Cinema, 19551969 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 275276. The review originally ran in
The Village Voice, 15 December 1966.
16. Clifford Terry, Warhol Focuses on Greenwich Village Hotel, Chicago Tribune, 26 June 1967,
B17.
17. These include the scene titled The Gerard Malanga Story, shot in a Greenwich Village apartment, and Their Town, a parody of Thornton Wilders Our Town, written by Ronald Tavel and shot at
the Factory. Scherman and Dalton, 342344.
18. Gerard Malanga, My Favorite Superstar: Notes on My Epic, Chelsea Girls, in Ill Be Your
Mirror, ed. Goldsmith, 128.
19. Early advertisements accompany the provocative disc-flickateque neologism with a more
conventional description of films and lightworks, emphasizing the events visual properties. New
York Times, 22 April 1966, 34.
20. Cinematheque projectionist Bob Cowan claims, I never ran it the same way twice if I could
help it. In a detailed account of his experimentation with sequencing, frame rates, projector lenses,
framing, and sound mixing, Cowan claims that for the color section he sometimes projected paired
reels on top of each other and waved glass and cardboard before the lens. At various times, preceeding [sic] and following the color section, I would fade color gels in and out on the black and
white sections of the film. Bob Cowan, My Life and Times with The Chelsea Girls, Take One 3,
no. 7 (SeptemberOctober 1971): 13.
21. Mekass 1970 Warhol filmography includes a list of eight reels from the September 15, 1966,
premiere program, including two reelsone of Nico titled The Closet and another of Edie Sedgwick
titled Afternoonthat were quickly dropped, with the segment commonly known as Nico Crying
replacing them. We have no way of confirming whether the list is comprehensive or representative of
the actual screening sequence. Mekas recalls, I got the film for the premiere with the order of reels
carefully written on paper and as far as I know that order was never changed. Sebastian Mekas,
e-mail message to author, 14 February 2011. A typed sequence from that period in the possession of
Gerard Malanga, and used here with his permission, is nearly identical to the instruction sheet currently
furnished to projectionists by the Museum of Modern Art. I thank Gerard Malanga for sharing this
document with me. Although the precise date standard sequencing began remains unknown, it
may have been in place before the film went into wider circulation (it was screened in Boston on

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51

November 18, 1966). Descriptions given in Dan Sullivan, Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls at the
Cinema Rendezvous, New York Times, 2 December 1966, 45, show that sequencing was definitely
set by the end of November.
22. The scene was shot in the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Amos. See Scherman and
Dalton, 354.
23. This reel derives from the film The Gerard Malanga Story.
24. For samples of dialogue from these and other scenes considered in this article, see David
Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 242248.
25. For more on the significance of white in Warhols work, see Taro Nettleton, White-on-White:
The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol Being, Art Journal 62, no. 1 (2003): 1523.
26. On the properties of Kodachrome film at the time, see Eliot Elisofon, Color Photography (New
York: Viking, 1961), 135.
27. Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), 173.
28. Sarris, The Chelsea Girls, 275.
29. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 28.
30. This counters Brian ODohertys assertion that The Chelsea Girls is quite possibly the first
masterpiece from a generation that has learned to handle the medium of film as casually as an artist
used to handle paint. Brian ODoherty, Narcissus in Hades, Art and Artists 1, no. 11 (February
1967): 13.
31. Johnson claims that color discord is permissible in film but not painting because a films temporal progression allows for eventual resolution. Both in serial painting and film, however, Warhol
deliberately explores the consequences of unresolved discord across the temporal experience.
Johnson, 12. See also Hal Fosters discussion of Warhols distressed images in Hal Foster, The First
Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 109171.
32. See Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Warhol 01, Paintings and Sculpture 19611963: The Andy
Warhol Catalogue Raisonn (London: Phaidon, 2002), 224248; and Georg Frei and Neil Printz,
Warhol 02A, Paintings and Sculptures 19641969: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonn (London:
Phaidon, 2004), 270275. Warhols 1963 series of Elizabeth Taylor portraits is another example.
33. Donald Judd, In the Galleries: Andy Warhol, Arts Magazine, January 1963, 49.
34. Bourdon, 126. For background on this painting and others in the series, see Frei and Printz,
Warhol 01, 233248.
35. Bourdon, 126. Bourdon claims that Warhol intended to present the two panels as separate
works but was encouraged by studio visitors to exhibit them as one work. Initially, Warhol debated
with himself whether to present the canvases as two separate pictures. But the visitors he polled
liked the tension set up between the two contrasting versions, so he abutted the two panels (126).
36. Rainer, 45.
37. Rainer, 45.
38. Parker Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime; or, Film la Warhol (1967), in Andy Warhol Film
Factory, ed. Michael OPray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 97. Tylers review originally

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appeared in Evergreen Review 11, no. 46 (April 1967): 2831, 8788.

39. Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime, 97.
40. Warhol and Hackett, 244.
41. This is the Their Town scene. One of the actors, Ronald Cutrone, explains, [I]t was a very static
situation. There was sort of a little wooden theatre box with about four or five people just standing
behind it like a counter, and we all had lines that we read very sort of wooden-like. Patrick S. Smith,
Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1988), 345.
42. These background projections are examined in Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The
Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonn (New York: Abrams/Whitney Museum of American Art,
2006), 287.
43. At the end of his trip, Emersons image dissolves in faint stroboscopic lighting as though about
to disappear altogether in this projection gone haywire.
44. Sarris, The Chelsea Girls, 276; and Ron Burnett, Chelsea Girls, Take One 1, no. 4 (April
1967): 2324.
45. Sullivan, 45; Jack Kroll, Underground in Hell, Newsweek 68, no. 20 (14 November 1966), 75;
Paul Ronder, The Chelsea Girls, Cinema Work Sheet, 21 October 1966, 7; and Marjorie Holt, The
Chelsea Girls : Warhols Rendezvous with Cinema, Cornell Daily Sun, 15 December 1966, 20. Kroll
goes on to call it one of the most impressive reels of film that Warhol ever shot.
46. Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime, 103; and Bourdon, 245. Ron Burnett was one of the few critics
unmoved by the scene, stating that a potentially poetic L.S.D. scene [turns] into a dry monologue,
heightened occasionally by the use of coloured lights. Burnett, 24.
47. William Marshall and Gilbert W. Taylor, The Art of Ecstasy: An Investigation of the Psychedelic
Revolution (n.p.: Burns and MacEachern, 1967), 7273.
48. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhols World and His Films (New York: Praeger, 1973), 92.
49. Bourdon, 247.
50. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), 124, 126.
51. Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime, 103.
52. Crimp, 109.
53. See Frei and Printz, Warhol 02A, 226257.
54. Frei and Printz, Warhol 02A, 227.
55. Robert Rosenblum, Andy Warhols Disguises, in Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, ed. Dietmar
Elger (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 25. Similar effects occurred when Warhol revisited the Monroe portraits in the 1967 screen print edition Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn). See Frayda
Feldman and Jrg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonn, 19621987, 4th ed. (New
York: D.A.P., 2003), 6769.
56. Douglas M. Davis, Using Film Trickery, Chelsea Girls Rummages around in World of Vice,
National Observer, 9 January 1967, n.p.
57. Bourdon, 248. Nicos relative inaction recalls Warhols many screen tests of friends and
acquaintances.
58. Koch, 90.

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59. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 228.
60. In Ondines second scene in The Chelsea Girls, he calls to Paul Morrissey, Warhol, and others
on set. Another example is Chuck Weins off-screen taunting of Edie Sedgwick in Beauty #2 (1965).
61. Susan Pile, The Chelsea Girls, Film Culture 45 (Summer 1967), 46. Piles interpretation
neglects the accompanying reels. Both scenes with Nico are accompanied by scenes of Ondine
ministering to womenscenes that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes chilling.
62. [N]o one seems to be acting at all. They just seem to be portraying themselves in a turned on
way. Charles A. Monaghan, Not So Grand Hotel, Cavalier 17, no. 7 (May 1967): 17. Los Angeles
Times critic Kevin Thomas writes, Warhol has given these people a situation to act out and then
holds the camera not merely until they eventually reveal themselves in all their degradation but until
the reel of film runs out. Kevin Thomas, Chelsea Girls at Cinema, Los Angeles Times, 22 March
1967, E15.
63. Bourdon, 240.
64. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (London: Studio Vista; New York: E.P. Dutton,
1971), 116. One reviewer complains, [V]isual intensity is undermined by the murkiness of the sound
track, which disturbs and constantly sends us back to the image in our search for meaning.
Monaghan, 17.
65. Nicos strange indifference to the unrelenting light changes and color changes in the last reel
is not unlike her performances in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, where the band played with an
icy aloofness . . . countered by the hot mix of media . . . all serving to saturate the space in dense
layers of swirling imagery and pulsating light. Roger Copeland, Seeing without Participating: Andy
Warhols Unshakable Determination Not to Be Moved, in Warhol Live: Music and Dance in
Andy Warhols Work, ed. Stphane Aquin (Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008),
31. For a consideration of the mechanisms, reception, and historical significance of the Exploding
Plastic Inevitable, see Branden W. Joseph, My Mind Split Open: Andy Warhols Exploding Plastic
Inevitable, Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002), 80107.
66. Carlo McCormick, The Urban Trip: New Yorks Psychedelic Moment, in Summer of Love:
Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and
Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University, 2005), 227. As Warhols friend Tally Brown later
recalled, these shows included flashing slides around . . . but it wasnt just in the performing area
but all aroundceiling [and] walls. See Smith, 253.
67. See Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime; and Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 287.
68. Warhol and Hackett, 204.
69. Joseph, 81.
70. Bla Balsz, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art), trans. Edith Bone
(London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 242.
71. Hollywood color designer Lansing C. Holden wrote as early as 1937, [I]n a dark theater with
a jet-black frame, colors are increased in contrast; this concentration makes them seem even brighter
than they are. Lansing C. Holden, Designing for Color, in We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy
Naumburg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937), 239.

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72. A preoccupation with the basic units of photographic construction motivated Jonas Mekas to
proclaim in 1964 that Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins, to the days of Lumire, for
a rejuvenation and a cleansing. Jonas Mekas, Sixth Independent Film Award (1964), in Film
Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 427. Mekass comments
were originally published in Film Culture 33 (Summer 1964): 1.
73. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), 136137.
74. Andrew Sarris quips, Goodbye Sergei Eisenstein. Hello, Eastman Kodak. Sarris, The Chelsea
Girls, 275.
75. Kracauer, 137.
76. Kevin Thomas writes, Reinforcing this effect is the way Warhol persuades us to forget the
passage of time in the conventional sense. Thomas, E15.
77. Tyler, Dragtime and Drugtime, 99.
78. Thomas Crow, Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol, in Andy Warhol,
ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 53, 61.

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