May 27th, 2015
6:00pm
@ Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz
320 East 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701 (map)
$10.25 (Buy Tickets)
Experimental Response Cinema’s 100th screening! Presented in its original 16mm double projection format, with an introduction by Warhol scholar Chelsea Weathers!
The Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol
210 min / 2 x 16mm / sound / 1966
Starring: Nico, Brigid Berlin, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Mario Montez, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet
“In The Chelsea Girls I found three of the most extraordinary sequences of the cinema I’ve ever seen. Since seeing it, I’ve been continually haunted by the movie’s beauty and power. Anyone seriously interested in films must see Warhol’s new movie because it goes into a whole new dimension.” – Shirley Clarke, 1966
“See the psychedelic circus where each act is grotesque life. Watch the addicts, homosexuals, beautiful women, lesbians, sadists, all the wicked as they document their perverse world. CHELSEA GIRLS is a powerful and important movie. CHELSEA GIRLS is remarkably real. CHELSEA GIRLS will shock you or maybe allow you to see more clearly, whichever. CHELSEA GIRLS is here and you can’t afford to miss it.” – Advertisement in The Los Angeles Free Press, 1967
“Fortunately, The Chelsea Girls is not concerned with deviation as a clinical subject, nor with homosexuality as a state of fallen Grace. Some of the more sophisticated Establishment reviewers write as if everything that happens south of 14th Street comes out of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ Warhol is not bosh, but neither is he Bosch. The Chelsea Hotel is not hell. It is an earthly, earthy place like any other where even fags, dykes and junkies have to go on living 24 hours a day. This is where Warhol has been heading through the somnambulism of Sleep and the egregiousness of Empire—toward an existential realism beyond the dimensions of the cinema. – Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, 1966
“If anybody wants to know what those summer days of ’66 were like in New York with us, all I can say is go see Chelsea Girls. I’ve never seen it without feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was right back there all over again. It may have looked like a horror show—‘cubicles in hell’—to some outside people, but to us it was more like a comfort—after all, we were a group of people who understood each other’s problems.” – Andy Warhol in Popism: The Warhol Sixties, 1980
“The most celebrated Andy Warhol feature (1966), and for many the best, is made up of a dozen 33-minute reels that are projected two at a time, side by side. The sound varies according to chance and the projectionist, as only one sound track is played at a time. The people shown include such Warhol “superstars” as Nico, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Mary Woronov (who later co-starred in Eating Raoul), Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Polk, and International Velvet. All apparently residents of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, they engage in a number of activities and dialogues for 210 minutes, and the results are often spellbinding; the juxtaposition of two film images at once gives the spectator an unusual amount of freedom in what to concentrate on and what to make of these variously whacked-out performers.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader