Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

Andy Warhol’s filmmaking process was inspired not only by his fascination with people, but by his desire to capture the actual experience of life. As he noted in his book POPism: The Warhol ’60s, “What I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment… I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves.”

Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol created more than 350 Screen Tests, 20 of which are screened in this exhibition. Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Nico, Lou Reed, and Susan Sontag were among the hundreds of subjects, all posed and recorded on 100-foot rolls of silent, black & white film by Warhol’s stationary 16mm Bolex camera.

These portraits are projected in slow motion so that each lasts about four minutes; as a sequence, they induce an almost hypnotic reverie that “help the audiences get more acquainted with themselves,” as Warhol once said.