Gary Needham

‘To play the poor little rich girl in the movies, Edie didn’t need a script – if she’d needed a script, she wouldn't have been right for the part’ (Andy Warhol, PoPism, p.110)

Edie Sedgwick, socialite, model, fashion icon, film star, and collaborator in Andy Warhol’s underground cinema of the 1960s. The legacy of Edie Sedgwick as the New York fashion icon (Vogue’s ‘youthquaker’ and Life’s ‘girl with the black tights’) and associate of Andy Warhol is still keenly felt today with the recent homage to her in a collection by Marc Jacobs, and an earlier one at Dior in 2005, and even thirty-three years after her death (then only 28 years old) her image was used to front a successful NARS cosmetics campaign; in short, Edie Sedgwick is the definition of iconic. Despite being a popular reference point in relation to fashion, glamour, stardom, the Velvet Underground’s ‘Femme Fatale', further exacerbated today through new media (the countless blogs, tumblrs, and tweets), little has been said about her productive and artistic collaboration with Andy Warhol from their public appearances as a couple (often mobbed at art openings, wearing identical clothes and silver dyed hair; mistaken for being in a romantic relationship) to their experiments in manufacturing celebrity, fame and stardom. During their relationship and/as collaboration, she a wealthy Boston socialite and heiress and he a famous Pop artist from a poor immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Warhol filmed Edie continuously throughout 1965 and for a spell again in 1966 and 1967 in, what I will argue, is a mutual exploration into the nature of acting, performance, and stardom. The Edie/Warhol relationship also signals an important shift in Warhol’s relationship to art as she ‘happens’ precisely when the artist shifts from fine art towards film, performance, and collaborative art practices, thus Sedgwick can be seen as central to the ways in which the boundaries between different art forms, genres, authorships, and cultures in the 1960s come to be challenged. Edie Sedgwick appears in nine Screen Tests, two film series that were organized around her called the Poor Little Rich Girl series and the Beauty series, in addition to scripted works by Ronald Tavel such Space, Afternoon, and Restaurant, and the more conceptual and experimental films Since (based on the JFK assassination), Lupe (a double screen projection), three early videos (Quintalogue, Edie #1 Space and Edie #2 Space) and Outer and Inner Space (one of the first examples of video art). Despite her extensive filmography with Warhol, little to nothing has been said about those films and videos (bar Outer and Inner Space) and her place in Underground cinema and more broadly her contribution and collaboration with Warhol and the American post-war avant-garde. This is in part because Edie is seen as muse and icon with her passive ‘image’ supplanting any attempt to evaluate her ‘artistic contribution’ and actual agency in the production of a number of key Warhol texts. This book examines the relationship between Edie Sedgwick and Warhol anew, specifically in relation to the filmmaking and cinema, detailing all 22 films and 3 videos, exploring several issues relevant to the study of Warhol and Warhol’s cinema, and proposing new ways of thinking about Warhol/Sedgwick in relation to collaborative artistic practices, acting, performance, stardom, and underground cinema.

This article explores Warhol and Nico's relationship with Europe through their formative years and subsequent collaboration in Warhol's underground and experimental filmmaking. In the 1950s Warhol was a commercial artist in New York, circulating in a gay milieu, and his work often conveyed Europe and a European sensibility in its illustration of 'all things Europe', but especially fashion. Nico was a fashion model and frequently seen in European fashion magazines before landing a few film roles, including a small part in La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960) and a featuring role in the French erotic film StripTease (Poitrenaud, 1962). Nico moved to New York and found her way to Warhol's art studio and social scene known as The Factory. At The Factory Nico joined the art-rock group The Velvet Underground at Warhol's insistence and featured in several films Warhol made between 1966 and 1967, including Chelsea Girls (Warhol, 1966) and a number of portrait films called Screen Tests (Warhol, 1964–1966). This article explores the presence and negotiation of Europe in both Nico's and Warhol's life and work in the 1950s and 1960s. The article pays particular attention to their early careers and the shifts in Nico's persona demonstrated by the difference between the French StripTease and Warhol's experimental Screen Tests.

Andy Warhol's Marilyns are often interpreted as a celebration of her stardom rather than a commentary on it. In Marilyn Diptych, made shortly after her death, Warhol searches beneath the facade at the private trauma of Norma Jean; Marilyn's luminosity seemingly consumed in the darkness of the black acrylic paint.

While recuperating in hospital after being shot, Andy Warhol tasked his studio associate Paul Morrissey with the job of the Factory’s next film, a vehicle for their recent non-professional acquisition Joe Dallesandro. Flesh harked back to Warhol’s 1965 film My Hustler and looked sideways at Midnight Cowboy (1969), a film that frustrated Warhol. "Hollywood" was moving into "their territory" of male hustlers, he remarks in POPism: “people with the money were taking the subject matter of the underground, counterculture life and giving it a good, slick, commercial treatment.” Filmed over a number of Saturday weekends in the summer of 1968 at a cost of $4000 Flesh was to become a turning point in Warhol’s cinema, which was already moving (pace post-Chelsea Girls [1966] toward commercial ambition and appeal. Flesh ran consecutively for seven months in its original 109m version at the Garrick Theatre from September 1968 then moved uptown in 1969 in a shorter 89m version and finally received international distribution in 1970.

Avant-garde critical circles, however, rejected Flesh for its commercial leanings and Morrissey’s hollow pastiche of Warhol’s film style. As Jonas Mekas rather politely put it, Flesh is “a good illustration of what Andy Warhol isn’t about. Probably the most important difference is that Flesh is constructed, plotted, and executed with a definite calculation to keep one interested in it.” For some, Flesh wasn’t underground or counter-cultural enough; for others with more commercial sensibilities, Variety for example, it was nonetheless steeped in “hapless erotica freakout” and “gross technical failure”.
This in-between-ness marks out a number of interesting tensions and shifts. Flesh would appear to be caught between several opposing artistic, cultural, and political traditions. Flesh’s apparent shift from underground to commercial film also needs to be situated with respect to late 1960s/early 1970s changes in sexual politics, representation, and screen performance. Dallesandro’s "trade aesthetic" and the liberal ways in which his body is "entered"’ into the "mainstream" is perhaps offered up as underground cinema’s gift to commercial cinema – Dallesandro’s erection, its apparent authenticity, is literally wrapped up in a bow for commercial audience delectation.

The 1974 film Born to Raise Hell was described by gay porn pioneer Fred Halstead as the best SM film he had ever seen and, more recently, by its current distributor (http://www.bijougayporn.com/tour/dvds.php?id=175) as 'the standard, the ultimate classic BDSM movie that all gay BDSM films are judged'. Rarely seen since the 1970s, the film was largely undocumented with the exception of Jack Fritscher's interview with the film's director Roger Earl in 1997 and has only recently seen the light of day. [1] My own interest in the film is around gay sexual cultures of the 1970s and the contiguous formal and political relations in representations of gay SM. This is also an attention to formal and sexual relations and the question of how sex is edited and, in turn, what (now) also gets 'edited out' through various cultural, political and legal policing in both representation and discourse. I want to claim Born to Raise Hell as an instance in which one can reassert the outlaw politics of homosexuality vis-à-vis contemporary queer theory, which, Tim Dean suggests, has become one of 'institutional respectability by strategically distancing itself from the messiness of the erotic'. [2] Politically, we need to reassert the erotic in queer studies if it is to have any meaning for our actually lived lives. Recovering Born to Raise Hell from the 1970s seems to me a useful place to start 'thinking sex' again. Born to Raise Hell raises some crucial ontological questions around film form, spectatorship and sex in ways that one might think of as proto-queer, affirmatively sadomasochistic but overtly essentialist too. The dilemma is that queer is a committedly anti-essentialist practice. Yet we need at times to be essentialist to achieve a certain political efficacy [3] and even a certain acknowledgment of existence in the matters of sex that, frankly, queer theory can't quite come to terms with these days. Conference after conference, queer theory or queer studies remains a sexless and, it should also be noted, AIDS-less affair. But we have been here before. The 1970s liberation-era publication Gay Sunshine declared 'we should cultivate a strong sense of dignity about our person, our bodies, rid ourselves of the repressive sexual habits which kept us down in filth – masochism… and sadism… sexual freedom is not freedom to degrade oneself'. [4] The difficulty in dealing with 'the messiness of the erotic' is already in place before the contemporary queer demonstrates its own intellectually icky-ness and sex-aversive abstinence, which now extends to the erasure of AIDS and HIV from its list of conference-able topics.

The intention of this article is to investigate the cultural power associ­ ated with the gimp and the gimp mask. The gimp is a clothed or cost­ umed Sadomasochistic (SM) body, frequently a submissive that often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture. Since the gimp's first outing and naming in the film Pulp Fiction it has become the byword for the head­to­toe leather SM look that has been appropriated by a number of designers as way of exploring and

The past fifteen or so years have seen a new engagement with the male body in French cinema suggestive of an intense fascination and over-investment in its cinematisation. This obsessive concern with the rendering of the male body as cinematic object is often through the close-up shot, revealing the body's shapes, contours and textures with unprecedented detail and proximity. This new visibility of the male body would also seem to run in tandem with the ascendancy of several French gay filmmakers and women filmmakers among them François Ozon, Sébastain Lifshitz, Gaël Morel, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat. These filmmakers have offered spectators new ways of seeing the male body, in close-up, with particular emphasis on nakedness and the penis (Figure 12). This chapter attempts to map some of those new visibilities of the male body in French cinema asking what is at stake in the work of those particular filmmakers as well as some ways of thinking about the male body and the penis in cinema as it is brought into proximity through the close-up shot.