Venues
Events
VideoFilm
Beyond the Absurd
The Far Out Collaborations of Ronald Tavel and Andy Warhol
| | More
Andy Warhol made hundreds of films—and thousands of videos—during his lifetime, partnering with fellow artists, celebrities and pedestrians, but his collaborations with Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Ronald Tavel had the most significant impact on the artist’s art. Tavel introduced scripted storylines and the use of sound—even dialogue—into Warhol’s voyeuristic, avant-garde works. “Beyond the Absurd” celebrates these collaborations that went on to become Warhol classics, pairing screenings of insightful interviews with films scripted by the prolific writer.
The program offers glimpses into the world of Andy Warhol. In was a walk-on part in homoerotic Western spoof Horse, featuring a real rented horse, that led Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick to a role in Vinyl (1965), Tavel’s S&M adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. Despite an otherwise all-male cast, the Factory Girl’s silent and still contribution stole the spotlight from the veteran actors around her, and captured Andy’s attention, for a while.
Due to popular demand, fan favorite The Chelsea Girls (1966) screens, despite Tavel’s limited involvement. However, the mainly improvised twelve-reel, double-projection film featured two reels, Hanoi Hanna and Their Town, based on Tavel’s scripts, capturing life, the mundane and the maniacal, within the Chelsea Hotel, populated by prostitutes, junkies, radicals and rock stars. Denounced by American film critic Rex Reed as “a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl,” the film was also hailed as the “Iliad of the Underground.”
After departing from the Factory, Tavel adapted many of his Warhol scripts for the stage, evolving the innovative methods of Theater of the Absurd further into the campy, surrealist Theatre of the Ridiculous, based upon manifesto, “We have passed beyond the Absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous.” However, when the ridiculous was no longer preposterous, Tavel focused on his writing. He was in the process of completing novel Chain, when he passed away earlier this spring.
Check out these and more Tavel films, exemplifying the New Yorker’s understated contributions to Warhol’s singular aesthetic, and his insight into the artist himself, designating him an essential cog in the Factory’s works, deserving of much more than 15 minutes of fame. The works are on display at the Anthology Film Archives, December 10-17. For more information, please visit http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org.