Blow Job

One Work

by Andy Warhol, Peter Gidal

A critical close-up of Warhol's famous film and its cultural impact In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of expression on the actor's we see only his head and shoulders, rigidly framed so that all offscreen space has to be imagined, or avoided. Sometimes the young actor looks bored, sometimes as if he is thinking, sometimes as if he is aware of the camera, sometimes as if he is not. Like the protagonists of other Warhol films, he is apparently left to his own devices. Warhol's 16mm films (including Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, and Henry Geldzahler), with their take on boredom, voyeurism, and the supposedly unmoving camera, continue to be influential today. In their own era of the early 1960s, they forced avant-garde film away from various forms of romantic illusionism and onto the reality of the specific film-as-projected. The film process itself became inseparable from the act of the viewer's viewing. In this extended examination of Blow Job, Peter Gidal deciphers the structures, abstract and concrete, of Warhol's crucial film. Warhol's techniques—the use of the close-up, the general use of camera movement, and the complete theatrical mis-en-scène—(especially when compared to the Godardian cinema verité of the time) make the materiality of the film process, its making and viewing, ineluctably present. Peter Gidal has written books on the works of Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter, as well as on avant-garde materialist film. An experimental filmmaker himself, Gidal has had retrospectives at the London Film Co-op, LUX, the National Film Theatre, Centre Pompidou, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the twentieth century's most important artists and cultural icons.

86 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2008

About the author

Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Reviews

[Marisa Carpico · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little heavier in the theory than I was expecting, but I think I’d have been more interested in Gidal’s argument if it were a bit more complex. His major point here seems to be to reiterate that Warhol’s films are about death and then relating that point in different ways. That said, a perspective I hadn’t considered and I do like the way he talks about Warhol’s approach as being about the passage of time.

Bought this in the Catskills last year during a vacation and think I might make that a vacation thing going forward with this and Pony Tales Vol. 1.

[Kurly Fry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good. as is my usual minor gripe with film writing, most of these people get so caught up in chasing the dragon of logic, theory, history, and making a credible argument, they forget to drop enough heat to be remembered. don't get me wrong, the later is an important pursuit, vital even, but if you don't also have the former, then that's a serious shame. ya gotta drop some bars on the people every now and then. anywho, book only takes a little longer to read than watching the actual film, so that's pleasant in and of itself.

[RJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s everything you experience, but are unable to describe, while watching the film. 🤷🏼‍♂️