Girl Interrupted: The Queer Time of Warhol's Cinema

Abstract

1966.1 The Screen Tests comprise a series of four-minute, silent, black and white portraits, usually shot in head-on close-up, and depict subjects of varying degrees of fame and anonymity, who usually return the camera's gaze with a relatively expressionless fixed stare. Aside from small permutations, the element of greatest variability from test to test is the lighting, which ranges from high-contrast silhouette to washed-out over-exposure.2 Curiously, Warhol does not seem to evaluate the silent, immobile subjects for any of the abilities or traits that a screen test would normally measure. His subjects barely move or speak. Most of them are posed at a consistent, fixed angle, and the majority of them do not appear in any of his other films. The Screen Tests , it would seem, are 'just tests: experiments without results, trial runs that yield no data. The test form has been de-teleologized; these films are neither preparatory nor subordinate to a final work. Warhol allows the trial-and-error aesthetic a