Previously unseen Andy Warhol films come to light
A whole trove of previously undeveloped films shot by late icon Andy Warhol has been recovered and will be made public in a one-time-only screening in New York.
The films, which will have never been seen before by Warhol’s eyes, will be displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on February 2nd.
Between the years 1963 and 1972, Warhol produced more than 600 films. Though he was famous for leading the Pop Art movement, the films allow fans of his work a new way into his creative vision.
The newly discovered moving image work totals over an hour in length and includes eight new Screen Test portraits of Warhol collaborators.
It also contains unused footage shot for his films Batman Dracula, Sleep, and Couch.
However, most notably, the recently uncovered trove includes several rolls of pornographic footage that shed new light on Warhol’s work, professionally and sexually, in the 1960s. Different erotic acts, from masturbation to fellatio, were captured.
This new find, therefore, proves that Warhol had been capturing scenes of an explicit nature on the couch in his Factory studio before the 1969 Blue Movie came about. Famously, Blue Movie went on to inspire the “porno chic” phenomenon.
The undeveloped films were discovered by chance in 2015, when Kate Trainor, who manages the MoMA’s film collections, and Greg Pierce, the then director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, stumbled on a box labelled “raw stock” at the facility in Pennsylvania where almost all of his work has been kept since his death.
Though nothing too shocking emerged from the stock, some of the film did include new footage of the band the Velvet Underground riding in a rented RV to a concert at the University of Michigan. The film roll containing those images was marked “3-12-66 Ann Arbor Car Ride”.
