Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space
Callie Angell
The following remarks were presented as an introduction
to a screening of Andy Warhol’s 1965 double-screen film, Outer and Inner
Space
, at the Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, on October 31,
2000. 1
Outer and Inner Space was restored by The Museum of Modern Art in
New York in 1998 and premiered as an installation at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in October 1998.2
Outer and Inner Space was first exhibited by Warhol at the Filmmakers
Cinematheque in New York City in January 1966, and was screened on only
a few other occasions in the 1960s; by the time of the premiere of the restored
film at the Whitney, Outer and Inner Space had not been seen in over
30 years.
The restoration of Outer and Inner Space is part of a long-term
collaborative project by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum
of Modern Art in New York to catalogue, research, preserve, and exhibit
the films of Andy Warhol. Since the project began in 1988, MoMA has restored
over 270 of Warhol’s Screen Tests and more than 40 other films, including
the 8-hour Empire, and the 5-and-a-half-hour Sleep . Since
1991, Callie Angell has served as Curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project
at the Whitney Museum and consultant to The Museum of Modern Art on the
preservation of the Warhol films. She is presently writing the catalogue
raisonné of the Warhol film collection, which will be published by
the Whitney in two volumes. The preserved Warhol films may be rented in 16mm
from The Museum of Modern Art, and may also be seen at The Andy Warhol Museum
in Pittsburgh. Both the Whitney’s research project and the Warhol film preservation
program at MoMA have been made possible with funding from The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
* * * *
After we premiered the restored version of this film at the Whitney
Museum in 1998, Bill Horrigan, who is the film curator at the Wexner Center
for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, wrote me to say that he thought Outer
and Inner Space contained virtually all the themes of Warhol’s work in
one place, that if all of Warhol’s artworks and films were somehow suddenly
lost, it might, he thought, be metaphorically possible to reconstruct it
all by extracting some of Outer and Inner Space’s DNA. I like this
genetic image because it offers such a vivid metaphor for the complex interweaving
of themes and ideas which takes place in this film on both a theoretical and
a material level. Some of the most important themes from Warhol’s paintings,
such as portraiture, celebrity, repetition, seriality, and the multiplication
of images, are literally interwoven through the manipulation of media
technology with the major themes of Warhol’s cinema, in which portraiture
is transformed into a kind of self-conscious performance, celebrity is recreated
and critiqued in the homemade avant-garde phenomenon of the Warhol superstar,
with the result that the moving image media of film and video suddenly become
as infinitely expandable and repeatable as Warhol’s seemingly endless series
of paintings. So the complex physical structure of this film works as
an image for its complex thematic structure as well.
Before I go on, I should explain what this film is, what you will see
in it, and how Warhol came to make it. Outer and Inner Space is
a 16mm film of Edie Sedgwick sitting in front of a television monitor on
which is playing a prerecorded videotape of herself. On the videotape,
Edie is positioned on the left side of the frame, facing right; she is talking
to an unseen person off-screen to our right. In the film, the “real” or “live”
Edie Sedgwick is seated on the right side of the film frame, with her video
image behind her, and she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to
our left. The effect of this setup is that it sometimes creates the rather
strange illusion that we are watching Edie in conversation with her own
video image. The film is two reels long, each reel is 1,200 feet or 33
minutes long, and the videotapes playing within the film are each 30 minutes
long. The two film reels are projected side by side, with reel One on the
left and reel Two on the right, and with sound on both reels. So what you
see are four heads, alternating video/film, video/film, and sometimes
all four heads are talking at once.
This is the only Warhol film in the entire Collection which incorporates
videotape. Warhol was able to make this film in August 1965 when he was
loaned some rather expensive video equipment by the Norelco Company. The
summer of 1965 was the time when portable, affordable video equipment designed
for the home market first became available to the general public; a number
of different companies, including Sony and Matsushida, were developing their
own home video recording systems and beginning to market them at prices ranging
from $500 to $1000 each. The Norelco video equipment was a rather high-end
system costing about $10,000, and it was loaned to Warhol as a kind of promotional
gimmick. That is, Warhol was quite well-known as an underground filmmaker
at the time, as well as an artist, and the idea was that Warhol would experiment
with the new video medium, see what he could do with it, and then report
on his experiences in a published interview and more or less give his endorsement
to the new medium and specifically to Norelco’s product. The Norelco equipment
was delivered to Warhol’s studio, the Factory, on July 30, 1965; in fact,
the arrival of the video camera and the ensuing conversations about it
between Warhol and his colleagues are some of the events documented in
the early chapters of Warhol’s tape-recorded novel, a novel. During
the month that Warhol had this video access, he shot approximately 11 half-hour
tapes (at least, that’s how many Norelco videotapes have been found in the
Warhol Video Collection). One of the interesting things about Outer and
Inner Space is that it contains, in effect, the only retrievable footage
from these 1965 videotapes. The Norelco system utilized an unusual video
format, called “slant scan video,” which differed from the helical scan
format developed by Sony and other video companies, and which very quickly
became obsolete. There are now no working slant scan tape players anywhere
in the world, the other videotapes which Warhol shot in 1965 cannot be played
back, and the only accessible footage from these early videos exists in
this film, which Warhol, in effect, preserved by reshooting them in 16mm.
Outer and Inner Space is Warhol’s first double-screen film, and in
this sense it is an important transitional work, since the double-screen
format was very important in his later cinema–for example in The Chelsea
Girls (l966), which is probably his best known film. It seems to me
that Warhol’s use of video in the making of this film led him directly to
the idea of double-screen film projection, that the double-screen format was
a logical outgrowth of his access to video. In the interview which was published
in Tape Recording magazine, Warhol talked about what he particularly liked
about video:
Question: Have you recorded from a television set with the video
recorder?
Warhol: Yes. This is so great. We’ve done it both direct and
from the screen. Even the pictures from the screen are terrific. Someone
put his arm in front of the screen to change channels while we were taping
and the effect was very dimensional. We found you can position someone in
front of a TV set and have it going while you’re recording. If you have close-ups
in the TV screen, you can cut back and forth and get great effects.
3
In other words, Warhol is particularly fascinated by the ability of
video playback to double the image of his subject–to place a person in
the same frame with his or her own image. And it seems to me this doubling
of a person’s image would naturally have reminded Warhol of his own paintings,
in which he often silkscreened multiple images of the same face onto the
same canvas. And once he had doubled the image of his subject, Edie Sedgwick,
by filming her in the same frame with her video image, it would seem an
obvious step to further multiply her image by adding a second film screen
to the first, just as he often multiplied the repeated images in his paintings
by adding on additional panels or canvases. So, I think that is what you
see happening in this film–the medium of video provides Warhol with a link
back to his own practice as a painter, and his practice as a painter then
suggests ways to further expand his filmmaking into the new formats of double-
and multi-screen projection which will dominate so much of his later film
work.
After Outer and Inner Space was shot in August 1965, Warhol began
planning other films for double-screen projection. For example, in October
1965 he made a film called The Bed, based on a play by Bob Heide,
which was filmed with two cameras–so you see the same action and dialogue
filmed simultaneously from two different vantage points, one head on, and
the other at a 45° angle. By January 1966, Warhol had started exhibiting
some films, such as Outer and Inner Space in double screen, and he
also began projecting many of his films in double and triple screen behind
the Velvet Underground during performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable
(EPI), which was the multi-media light show which Warhol produced
to accompany the Velvet Underground during their rock-and-roll concerts,
and which combined multiple film projections with projections of colored
lights, patterned slides, flashing strobe lights, and so on. Warhol was working
very closely with his assistant Dan Williams during this time, and they developed
a lot of experimental techniques not only for the exhibition of multi-screen
films, but for the shooting of these films as well–for example, using very
dramatic camera movements, rapid zooming and panning and circling of the
camera and so on, visual effects which would look even more complicated
and dazzling in contrast with each other when shown side by side. You don’t
see this kind of elaborate camera movement in Outer and Inner Space; there
is really only one slow zoom in and another zoom out. But you do see a lot
of this experimentation in The Chelsea Girls , with black-and-white
images on one screen next to color footage on the other, pans and zooms
and out of focus shots contrasting with camera movements in the opposite
direction on the other screen, and so on. In an even later film called
**** (Four Stars) from 1967, Warhol further complicated the
idea of the expanded cinema format by projecting one reel of color film on
top of another, in superimposition, so all of these camera movements and
different colors and imagery blend together in an almost psychedelic manner.
Outer and Inner Space is a very careful, almost formal work
in contrast with the looseness and expansiveness of this later style, but
I think it implicitly contains all the possibilities of these later developments.
Warhol had, of course, made a great many films before Outer and Inner
Space. The history of the Warhol films is, of course, very complex.
I apologize that I am not able to get into it in any detail in this brief
talk, but I can generalize enough to say that a great many of Warhol’s films
prior to Outer and Inner Space were, in effect, portrait films, and
that Warhol’s sense of portraiture in his films was often very confrontational.
In the films, the act of portraiture is stretched out over time and, therefore,
becomes a kind of performance, and the most interesting and authentic film
performances are sometimes evoked or even deliberately provoked in what
could only have been experienced by the performer as a kind of ordeal. One
of Warhol’s most important works in film is the enormous serial work called
Screen Tests, a series of 4-minute black and white silent portrait
films of people simply facing the movie camera. There are 472 of these films
in the Warhol Film Collection. One of the main themes in the early Screen
Tests was the idea that these filmed portraits could be mistaken for
photographs; sometimes people were instructed to hold completely still and
not even blink, in the hopes that the resulting film would be so static
and unmoving that it would be indistinguishable from an actual photograph,
as a kind of joke on the viewer. But what happens in these films, of course,
is that this performance requirement makes people very uncomfortable; it’s
very hard to hold still for three minutes, and it’s nearly impossible not
to blink (although a couple of people did manage it), and so instead of
pseudo-photographs, what you get are some very intense performances, performances
which emerge from the tension that is created when people are asked to behave
as if they were their own image. In a sense, the Screen Tests are like
little documentaries about what it is like to sit for your portrait, and
what you see in these films are people engaged in direct physical conflict
with the idea of their own image. This is essentially the same struggle which
Edie is engaged in in Outer and Inner Space, except that in this case
her image has been prerecorded and she must occupy both the same space and
the same moment of time with it, listening to her own voice whispering into
her ear like a ghost from the past, while facing down the movie camera that
is recording every moment of her existential ordeal in the present.
Edie Sedgwick was, of course, the star of a great many other Warhol
films, most of them made in the first half of 1965, before Outer and
Inner Space . She was a very beautiful, intelligent, and yet rather
unstable young woman who was absolutely stunning on film. As you know,
Warhol was also fascinated by Marilyn Monroe and produced many portraits
of her, and it is my sense that in Edie Sedgwick he felt he had discovered
his own Marilyn Monroe–someone who was as beautiful, as vulnerable, as otherworldly,
and as doomed as Marilyn was. Warhol was very ambitious as a filmmaker,
and Edie represented, I think, some of his greatest hopes for his own filmmaking:
not only did Edie look like Marilyn, but I think he hoped she also might
prove to be as big a film star. Warhol made a whole series of films which
were basically just films about her, star vehicles for Edie Sedgwick. He
began this series with the idea of making a 24 hour film of a day in the
life of Edie Sedgwick, a project which was never completed, but which ended
up as a series of feature-length portrait films: Poor Little Rich Girl
, Beauty #2, Face, Restaurant, Afternoon, and so on. Some of these
films are rather straightforward recordings of Edie at home, almost like cinema
verite documentaries, but others like Beauty #2, are more confrontational
in their attempt to provoke a more authentic or extreme performance. These
films are uncomfortable to watch, sometimes even rather cruel, but it is my
belief that Edie, like most Warhol film stars, participated in these ordeals
with full understanding of their purpose: that is, if she didn’t know exactly
what was going to happen in a particular film, she would nevertheless have
fully agreed–at least in principle–to the idea of being pressured for the
sake of a more interesting or more authentic performance.
Outer and Inner Space is one of the last Edie Sedgwick films from
1965. She also appears in another film called Space, shot around the
same time, and later in Lupe, her last film from 1965, in which she
re-enacts the suicide of the Hollywood actress Lupe Velez, and dies repeatedly,
at the end of three different reels, from an overdose of sleeping pills,
with her head in the toilet. In both of these films, interestingly, Edie’s
image is also doubled but through the use of mirrors: that is, in both
Space and Lupe Warhol places Edie in front of a mirror and then
films her face to face with her own reflection, recreating the double-portrait
which he was able to achieve with video. This technique of repetition of
an image evokes a technique which is most familiar in Warhol’s paintings–repeating
the image of a strong and beautiful face as a way of making it both more
powerful and somehow emptier of meaning–and the use of this technique in
the Sedgwick films underscores the direct equivalence between Edie Sedgwick
and Marilyn Monroe in Warhol’s aesthetic pantheon. Lupe was also shown
as a double- or even triple-screen film–there are, in fact, three reels of
this film–and was at one point projected in triple screen as part of the
Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Edie ended her association with Warhol
around January 1966, but returned briefly in the summer of 1967 to appear
in a couple of reels of **** (Four Stars). She died in 1971 at the
age of 28, six years after Outer and Inner Space was made, from an
accidental overdose of barbiturates.
Outer and Inner Space is a very carefully constructed film. You will
notice that in the video image of Edie, she’s positioned on the left side
of the frame, on the videotape, leaving a space on the right side of the
video image where the head of the “real” Edie can fit in the foreground.
The film begins with Reel One on the left, with a close up of Edie’s two heads,
one video, one film; after a while, the camera slowly pulls back into a medium-long
shot, in which you see the upper half of Edie’s body positioned in front
of the television monitor and the dark space and foiled-covered windows of
the Factory behind her. Reel Two, on the right, begins with this same long
shot, and then gradually zooms forward into close up. When the two reels
are projected side by side, with Reel One on the left, these two camera movements,
the in and out zooms, gradually pass each other in the middle, with each
reel ending where the other begins. The end of each reel arrives twice, first
on video, and then on film–and you get effects such as the electronic breakdown
of the video image at the end of the videotape followed by the flare-out
of the film image at the end of the film reel. Another interesting thing
that happens in close-up is that the video image of Edie’s head is larger
than her real head, and this creates a sort of optical illusion–that is,
the video image of her head, being larger, appears to be closer to us than
her real head, which is smaller, so our perception of the depth in the image
is reversed. I think this spatial distortion, this sense of penetration
into and then withdrawal from the complex visual depths of these images,
may be what the title of the film, Outer and Inner Space , refers
to. Of course, the title also makes reference to Edie’s psyche, the exteriority
of her image versus the interiority of her subjective experience.
There is a similar manipulation on the soundtrack: just as the film
images move in and out, the sound also moves in and out. There is sound
on all four channels in the film–in other words, there is the sound of Edie
speaking on both videotapes and there is also the sound of what Edie is
saying on film in both reels, so sometimes you get all four heads speaking
at the same time. But audio levels of the video monitor were also being adjusted
while the tape was playing and also the sound levels of the audio recording
on the film while it was being shot, so you get this weaving in and out of
the audibility of the soundtracks, which I guess was probably meant to parallel
the zooming in and out of the film images. This effect was not particularly
successful; in fact, I should point out that this soundtrack, in double screen
anyway, is almost totally incomprehensible. But I think the effect of a babble
of overlapping and inaudible voices works well with the rather overpowering
complexity of the film and video images.
I also wanted to point out that you can notice Warhol’s presence in
the film in a couple of places, where you see Edie looking at the camera,
or slightly above it, to get directions from Warhol. At the end of the second
reel, on the right, she sneezes several times on the videotape, and you
can see Edie looking above the camera while she waits for Warhol to give
her the signal when to sneeze back, since he is cuing her to sneeze in response
to her own sneezes on the videotape. So you can read the presence of Warhol
into the film, and you see some of his filmmaking assistants as well–for
example, Gerard Malanga, who is briefly visible behind the television monitor
on occasion. There are some very complex lines of communication in this film,
all of which are, of course, very distracting for Edie–the presence of her
videotape behind her speaking into her ear; the person off screen left to
whom she’s talking “now”; the camera she’s facing; Warhol above the camera,
looking down upon her and giving her directions about what to do; the ends
of the film reel and the videotape approaching simultaneously; other noises
being made by other people at the Factory, and so on. This would drive almost
anyone crazy, but Edie is not all that stable to begin with, so it makes
her even more fractured. It’s a painful film, very beautiful, but very painful
as well.
Now, a final point of some considerable historical interest, and that
is that Outer and Inner Space does indeed seem to be the very first
documented use of videotape by an artist. By the mid-sixties, some artists
were working with television as an art object, especially, of course, Nam
June Paik, who had his first exhibition of electronically and sculpturally
altered television sets in 1963, but–as I said–affordable video equipment
became available only in the summer of 1965, and Andy Warhol actually used
it before Paik did. Nam June Paik’s first videotape was shot with portable
Sony equipment on October 4, 1965 and exhibited the same day at the Café-au-Go-Go,
in an exhibition called “Electronic Video Recorder.” Outer and Inner Space
predates that moment, since it was shot in August, and in the film you
see Warhol deliberately experimenting with some of the techniques specific
to the video medium which other artists would explore more fully only in
the 1970’s. They are playing with the electronic breakdown of the video image
while the tape is playing, they distort the scanning of the image, they
manipulate the vertical roll on the tv set so the image goes flipping by
very quickly, they pause the tape so the image freezes on the tv, and they
even turn off the tape at the end so you get a little bit of a broadcast
tv image. A number of video artists like Paik, Al Robbins, and Joan Jonas
explored these specific electronic aspects of the video medium in later
works in the seventies–like Jonas’s tape Vertical Roll from 1972–but
this film was made seven years before that.
I’m a little puzzled by what this discovery means. How can we think
about this film today in relation to the history of video art? Outer
and Inner Space was made at a time when there actually was no such
thing as video art, the film was shown only a few times in the 1960’s,
so it really had no contemporary impact in that context at all, and was
probably not seen by anyone who was then identified as or likely to become
a video artist. So I’m not convinced that the discovery of this film will–or
should–rewrite the history of video art retroactively. Instead, I think its
real import lies in what it tells us about Andy Warhol and his particular
genius for instantly and intuitively grasping the conceptual possibilities
of any media technology he got his hands on. Warhol did go on in the 1970’s
and 1980’s to make a great deal of video, but very little of this work falls
into the category of video art; most of this later video work belongs to
much more commercial genres, such as magazine format television shows, music
videos, promotional videos, celebrity interviews, and so on. Perhaps Warhol
didn’t find video very interesting as an artistic medium; perhaps he had
set his sights on larger ambitions, like broadcast television. In any case,
the Warhol Film Collection, all 290 hours of it, still stands, I think, as
the best example of how far Warhol could–and would–in fact go in exploring
the possibilities of moving image media. But Outer and Inner Space
demonstrates what a quick study Warhol was once he got his hands on a
new medium. This makes me think what a shame it is that Warhol is not still
alive today. The Internet, to give just one example, might be a much more
interesting place to visit if he had been able to spend a month or two
fooling around with it.