Free Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum

though occasionally his voice can be heard, giving faint directions. Strips of leader, however, reinstate his ghost-pale presence; they appear, revenants, at that last moment when soporific whiteness triumphs over actors trying to create impressions of their own.
    In Haircut , the leader functions magically: at the end of the final reel, the performers—haircutter Billy Name, the young man (John Daley) whose hair is being cut, and the shirtless dancer Freddy Herko, who moves, pipe-smokes, and strips in the haircut’s vicinity—yawn and rub their eyes, as if they were A Midsummer Night’s Dream players awakening from imposed enchantment. As the Haircut participants, disbelieving their visions, try to disperse the fog of deluded sense, the leader gradually falls, a white pall, over their faces. In any Warhol reel ended by the leader, it lands, always, twice—first as a foreshadowing, a slight whitening that doesn’t entirely efface the image, which resolidifies, but only for a moment; and second, for good, when the leader resumes, erasing the image forever, or until the next reel. Thus at the end of each segment, the viewers experience a miniature, spunk-white death, a blotto orgasm, a swooning obliteration of consciousness: first we foretaste death, which encourages us to pay strict attention to the faces when they return, because we know that in another moment the grave whiteness is going to rob our sight; and then we experience the last onset of blankness, and we are relieved, fatigued by the reel’s longueurs.
    Watching Warhol films is a pleasure that too few people have experienced, and I want to proselytize. As Jonas Mekas, Stephen Koch, and other appreciators have noted, these films question every assumption that cinematic art has accreted in its century-long history. And though Warhol influenced experimental and mainstream film, most of his innovations have not been pursued by his successors. Into the viewer’s viscera, Andy pumps full-strength his experience of time as traumatic and as erotic. Time has the power to move and the power to stand still; time’s ambidextrousness thrills and kills him.
    In Haircut (No. 1) , typical for Warhol, there are no title credits; always, only a piece of tape on the reel’s canister gives a simple identifying word— Eat, Shoulder, Horse , or Afternoon. In most of the pre-1965 films, there is no sound, and the film is projected at silent speed, (ideally) sixteen frames per second, though sometimes eighteen. (Sound speed is twenty-four frames per second.) The films, therefore, take longer to show than they took to make. Literally, they stretch duration. Within each reel, the camera does not move; the stationary camera is his trademark. (In his other films, when the camera budges, it erratically disregards the action; it digresses, ignores the star. Ronald Tavel, who wrote scenarios for many of Warhol’s finest sound films, said in an interview, “As the script starts to build toward a climax, the camera leaves and goes up to the ceiling and begins to examine furniture … .” Warhol’s camera, like an inattentive schoolchild, wanders away from the lesson.) In Haircut (No. 1) , each reel has a painting’s hieratic stillness. And because the actors’ movements are minor, plotless, the eye registers every change as a cataclysm, worthy of scrutiny. Warhol magnifies the importance of each facial vibration and thus teaches arts of empathy and diagnosis. Although his technique relies entirely on the camera’s personality, and thus seems mechanical, without soul (Billy Name has intimated that Andy’s cinematographic aim was to learn how the camera saw), the lesson of the films—pay attention to a face’s subtle psychological evidence—induces a paranoid relation to the other’s emotional oscillation, rather than blissed-out apathy.
    Watching dozens of hours of these early Warhol films in which