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拍品專文
‘People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like you’re watching television -- you don’t feel anything.’
—ANDY WARHOL
Two naked figures, their faces obscured, are frozen in time, bathed in blue light: as a woman lifts herself from a bed, she casts a shadow over the behind of the man lying next to her, the picture crackling with subtle motion and intimacy. Blue Movie (1968) is a unique still from Andy Warhol’s movie of the same name and a gorgeous, tender record of youth. An exceptionally rare artwork from this era of Warhol’s career, in which the artist had all but stopped making paintings in order to focus on his work in film, the still is printed on luxuriant, shimmering aluminium foil; while light glints from its reflective surface, the picture’s deep, blue shadows define the forms of the young couple’s bodies with refined elegance, creating a play of light and shade that gives the work a quiet timelessness.
Blue Movie was perhaps the most controversial film Warhol ever made; originally entitled Fuck, the film depicts Warhol associates Viva and Louis Waldon performing various menial household tasks, discussing the Vietnam War and, most notoriously, having unsimulated sex in one uninterrupted thirty-three minute take. After being shown publicly for the first time in July 1969 at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater, ten days into its run police arrested the cinema’s staff and confiscated the film, eventually fining the manager $250, to which Warhol responded by publishing the film’s dialogue, as well as several explicit stills, in a book. Yet despite the controversy, what is truly remarkable about Blue Movie, is its total lack of affectation and, indeed, plot. Simply aspiring to present the real lives of two ordinary people over one afternoon, with all the languor and aimlessness that necessarily entails, the film achieves a casual serenity – a serenity that radiates from this still’s delicate composition, with its two anonymous, graceful bodies that could be any young couple captured in a moment of blissful purposelessness.
Warhol explained his thinking in a Vogue interview around the time: ‘Scripts bore me. It's much more exciting not to know what's going to happen. I don't think plot is important. If you see a movie of two people talking you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved - you miss things - you come back to it... But you can't see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending… Everyone is rich. Everyone is interesting… They're not-real people trying to say something. And we're real people not trying to say anything’ (A. Warhol, quoted in V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge MA, 2003, p. 327).
—ANDY WARHOL
Two naked figures, their faces obscured, are frozen in time, bathed in blue light: as a woman lifts herself from a bed, she casts a shadow over the behind of the man lying next to her, the picture crackling with subtle motion and intimacy. Blue Movie (1968) is a unique still from Andy Warhol’s movie of the same name and a gorgeous, tender record of youth. An exceptionally rare artwork from this era of Warhol’s career, in which the artist had all but stopped making paintings in order to focus on his work in film, the still is printed on luxuriant, shimmering aluminium foil; while light glints from its reflective surface, the picture’s deep, blue shadows define the forms of the young couple’s bodies with refined elegance, creating a play of light and shade that gives the work a quiet timelessness.
Blue Movie was perhaps the most controversial film Warhol ever made; originally entitled Fuck, the film depicts Warhol associates Viva and Louis Waldon performing various menial household tasks, discussing the Vietnam War and, most notoriously, having unsimulated sex in one uninterrupted thirty-three minute take. After being shown publicly for the first time in July 1969 at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater, ten days into its run police arrested the cinema’s staff and confiscated the film, eventually fining the manager $250, to which Warhol responded by publishing the film’s dialogue, as well as several explicit stills, in a book. Yet despite the controversy, what is truly remarkable about Blue Movie, is its total lack of affectation and, indeed, plot. Simply aspiring to present the real lives of two ordinary people over one afternoon, with all the languor and aimlessness that necessarily entails, the film achieves a casual serenity – a serenity that radiates from this still’s delicate composition, with its two anonymous, graceful bodies that could be any young couple captured in a moment of blissful purposelessness.
Warhol explained his thinking in a Vogue interview around the time: ‘Scripts bore me. It's much more exciting not to know what's going to happen. I don't think plot is important. If you see a movie of two people talking you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved - you miss things - you come back to it... But you can't see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending… Everyone is rich. Everyone is interesting… They're not-real people trying to say something. And we're real people not trying to say anything’ (A. Warhol, quoted in V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge MA, 2003, p. 327).