An Introduction to the Fearless Early Warhol

“Cinema Warhola: An Introduction to the Films of Andy Warhol” offers the first opportunity to see the early Warhol films in over 20 years. It’s a special presentation of the Filmforum and Temp’Theque at the Directors Guild this weekend.

If in his art Warhol freed us to enjoy popular advertising imagery we had actually liked all along, in his films he was fearless before the utterly banal, filming people asleep and eating. (He thought such films should be projected on walls, like paintings, which we could choose to watch or ignore.) He was casual about sex, drugs, nudity and language at a time when Hollywood’s old Production Code was only just crumbling.

Gradually he developed offhand narratives with the deadpan, often campy humor of the put-on. Between 1963 and 1968, Warhol turned out a series of films that were among the most convention-defying of the decade.

The key film of the weekend is Warhol’s “The Chelsea Girls” (1966), a split-screen guided tour of Warhol’s Inferno. For three hours and 20 minutes, a largely unsympathetic array of lowlifes, supposedly tenants of Manhattan’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, treat us to their self-indulgent, indolent misery. The split screen, however, is no mere gimmick but a way of creating a demented, sealed-off world that persuades us to forget the passage of time in the conventional sense, resulting in a hypnotic feeling that we’re witnessing a vision of Hell eternal. “The Chelsea Girls” is Warhol at his most disturbing.

“Nude Restaurant” (1967) completed a trilogy that included “I, a Man” and “Bike Boy” and constituted perhaps the most honest and thorough--and certainly the most graphic--explorations of the emotions of young dropouts in the ‘60s. The three films were linked only by Warhol’s focus on the state of relations between the sexes and by the relentless interview technique with which he got a subject to yield himself or herself to the camera.

By now, Warhol had begun to back off from put-on in favor of a more direct relevance. Marked by a pathos pointed up by a corrosive humor, “Nude Restaurant” focuses on Garboesque Warhol superstar Viva! As a waitress in a fantasy restaurant setting, she and her customers wear only G-strings as she talks nonstop (but always with wit and interest) of her life; at the same time Viva! seems tarantula-like alongside the passive Warhol males, especially when she’s perversely paired with the marvelously bleary and woebegone Taylor Mead.

Frequently hilarious--but often just plain tedious--the outrageous shot-in-Arizona parody “Lonesome Cowboy” (1968) has the usual Warhol home-movie ingredients: sex, nudity, four-letter words. Who but Warhol would have dared at that time to portray a cowboy out West as a Times Square hustler and a sheriff as a transvestite or recommend ballet as a good exercise for sharpshooting?

What little plot there is casts Viva! as the proud beauty Ramona D’Alvarez with Mead as her nurse, who is supposed to be protecting her virtue--an impossible task. Interestingly, Ramona’s cowhand lovers, most of whom are handsome in the Warhol street-urchin tradition, have an easier, nonviolent masculinity than the mythic Hollywood cowboys they’re parodying.

While Warhol was recuperating from his near-fatal 1968 gunshot wound, his technical assistant Paul Morrissey made his directorial debut with “Flesh.” For all the similarities between this and Warhol’s films--the casual, uninhibited sex and language, the strobe cuts and familiar passive hero on an erotic odyssey--there are decided and revealing differences. Not as resolutely detached as Warhol but not as determinedly exploitative of his actors either, Morrissey views a New York hustler (Joe D’Allesandro) with more compassion than his mentor would have. In following two days in the hustler’s sordid existence, Morrissey manages to create a quality of tenderness and poignancy in regard to a kind, actually quite likable guy whom everyone regards as a sex object rather than as a person. (D’Allesandro will appear with the film Sunday night.)

Often outrageous, sometimes funny and always with a profound sadness lurking just beneath a nonchalant surface, “Flesh” signalled the end of Warhol’s film directing and the beginning of Morrissey’s distinctive, ongoing career.

Just added to the schedule is Chuck Workman’s “Superstar,” an intriguing if not entirely illuminating new documentary on Warhol, the most elusive of subjects. It screens Saturday at 4:30 p.m. with a discussion with Workman, actor/director Paul Bartel and Warhol superstar Billy Name.

For show times and full schedule: (213) 466-FILM, (213) 276-7452, (714) 923-2441.