Notes on THE CHELSEA GIRLS: A Film by Andy Warhol

Abstract

Among Warhol's more recent films, The Chelsea Girls is in some ways different from any of its predecessors, for it has the full complement of sound, movement, multiple images, and story line that the artist had laboriously discarded in his earlier cinematic, work. The introduction of enriched content can be taken as yet another attempt by the artist to criticize formal cinematic procedure. For in this film, it is most particularly the way a movie is looked at and the way the information is assimilated by the audience that comes under scrutiny. As in Screen Test, the apparent and the real subject are two different things. In The Chelsea Girls two different films are shown simultaneously side by side on a wide screen. Occasionally they may overlap. The pictures are said to suggest a series of rooms at the Chelsea Hotel (on West 23rd Street in Manhattan) and to depict what goes on in them. Each program is more or less the same, with the films (some black and white and some in color) shown in the same order. The films last about half an hour apiece and follow each other without interruption. The series plays for about four hours.