[Frameworks] Andy Warhol's SLEEP / Providence, RI / Feb 18 / Magic Lantern + RK Projects
Eli Horwatt
ehorwatt at gmail.com
Sun Feb 12 13:03:52 CST 2012
A funny story about the correct projection speed from Kelly M. Cresap's *Pop,
Trickster, Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete: *
Stan Brakhage, a pioneer in underground cinema, became enraged on seeing *Sleep
*and *Eat*, declaring that they were the work of a charlatan. On learning
that he had seen the films projected at twenty-four frames per second
instead of Warhol's preferred rate of sixteen-frames, he agreed to watch
the films again and then hailed them as transformative works on par with
his own.
On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Myron Ort <zeno at sonic.net> wrote:
> Never mind. It looks like they are projecting at 16fps.
> excellent.
>
> mo
>
>
> On Feb 12, 2012, at 10:06 AM, Josh Guilford wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> .... .... .... ....
>
> R.K. Projects + Magic Lantern Cinema Present
> a very special screening of:
>
> *SLEEP
> *
> * *by Andy Warhol
>
> featuring John Giorno
> 5.5hr long-form cinema projected on 16mm film
>
> w/ a performance of Erik Satie's, *Vexations* (1893)
> by Sakiko Mori, Daryl Seaver and XSV @ 6:15pm
>
> Saturday February 18th from 6pm - 2am
> 40 Rice Street
> Providence
> 02907
>
>
> Andy Warhol, *Sleep*, 1963, 16mm film, b/w, silent, 5 hours
> and 21 minutes @16fps
> ©2012 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of
> Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.
> Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum
>
>
> *“What is sleep, after all, but the metabolic transformation of the
> entire experience*
> *of time, our nightly release from the clock’s prison…” - Stephen Koch*
>
> Sleep harbors a potential to alter the temporal fabric of our world.
> What would it mean to live the time of sleep while awake, to collectively
> activate its other temporality in a pocket of space and sleep awake
> together? If sleeping together amounts to “sharing an inertia, an equal
> force that maintains the two bodies together,” then the stillness of sleep
> may paradoxically give way to a journey, with bodies “drifting like… narrow
> boats moving off to the same open sea, toward the same horizon always
> concealed afresh in mists…”1
>
> Magic Lantern Cinema and RK Projects have collaborated to present an
> off-site screening of Andy Warhol’s 5.5hr anti-film – *Sleep*. The first
> film that Warhol made after purchasing a 16mm camera in 1963, *Sleep*began as an experiment to document an activity that the amphetamine-induced
> energy of the 1960s seemed to be rendering obsolete. Yet Warhol’s film is
> not simply a documentary, but an erotic milieu for ruminating the
> philosophical implications of time and repetition, as well as a physical
> meditation on the non-narrative materiality of film itself. Warhol
> completed the film after his experience attending John Cage’s 1963
> performance of Erik Satie’s epically repetitive work for piano, *Vexations,
> (*1893) – a 52-beat segment played slowly and in succession 840 times.
> The repetitive structure of *Vexations* is apparent in *Sleep* as well:
> recorded as a series of long takes using 100 ft. magazines (approx. 3 mins)
> shot from multiple angles over a period of several weeks, the shots were
> then repeated through loop-printing and spliced together end-to-end, with
> emulsion and perforations left as-is. And though the entire film was shot
> at sound speed (24fps), it was meant to be projected at silent speed (16 or
> 18fps), causing movements to appear in an ethereal slow-motion. The result
> is a highly constructed piece of minimalist long-form cinema whose emphasis
> on time, materiality, repetition, and the quotidian has drawn comparisons
> to modernist painting while also earning Warhol a position as “the major
> precursor of structural film” and a 1964 Independent Film Award for “taking
> cinema back to its origins.”2
>
> *Sleep* premiered in New York City’s Gramercy Arts Theater in 1963. But
> the film’s extreme stillness and duration have been said to promote a more
> casual and intermittent approach to spectatorship than that affiliated with
> theatrical exhibition, encouraging viewers to “chat during the screening,
> leave for a hamburger and return, [or] greet friends [while] the film
> serenely devolve[s] up there on the screen.”3 In an effort to cultivate
> such an experience and acknowledge Warhol’s diverse experiments with
> non-theatrical exhibition forms (from the Factory walls to live multimedia
> performances), this screening will be held in a vacant, slumbering
> warehouse at 40 Rice St., generously donated by The Armory Revival Co. in
> Providence, RI. To mark this significant event, there will also be a
> staging of the musical performance that inspired the film. Three
> Providence-based musicians will be conducting a 45 minute performance of
> Erik Satie’s *Vexations* immediately preceding the screening. In
> addition, a selection of relevant reading materials will be on display at
> the screening.
>
> Refreshments will be provided along with chairs, but viewers can enter and
> exit at will, and sleeping bags are strongly encouraged. Join us for an
> evening of *Sleep*.
>
>
> SUGGESTED DONATIONS
> SLIDING SCALE: $3 - $5
>
> Funded by the Malcolm S. Forbes
> Center for Culture and Media Studies
> Brown University
>
> RK Projects + Magic Lantern Cinema
> 40 Rice Street
> Providence, RI 02907
>
> 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, *The Fall of Sleep* (New York: Fordham UP, 2009): 19.
> 2 P. Adams Sitney, *Visionary Film* (New York: Oxford UP, 2002): 349; *Film
> Culture* 33 (Summer 1964): 1.
> 3 Stephen Koch, *Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol*(New York: Marion Boyars, 1991): 39.
>
>
>
>
> *//////*
> *
> *
> RK PROJECTS │
> Providence* * │ rkprojects.com │ More info on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/#%21/events/318553874847410/>
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--
Eli Horwatt
York University, Toronto
Ph.D. Student - Cinema & Media Studies
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