Warhol · Method 4 of 12
Screen Tests
1964–1966
The method
Five and a half minutes, silent, of a face trying to hold itself. That is the whole piece. The first thirty seconds are the sitter's performance of composure. Around minute two the composure cracks, or it doesn't, and whichever happens becomes the film. Warhol has arranged a situation in which nothing is supposed to happen and then recorded the moment the sitter realizes this is the situation. Some faces smile through it. Some collapse. Some harden into the mask they showed up wearing and wait for the reel to end. The Screen Tests are the purest version of Warhol's question: what does a face do when it is looked at for longer than a face is usually looked at? The answer, it turns out, is the face.
Process
Four-minute silent 16mm film reels, Bolex camera on a tripod, sitter instructed to hold still. Projected at slower-than-recorded speed — approximately three-quarter speed — so the four-minute roll stretches to about five and a half minutes and every blink becomes an event. No sound. No direction beyond the instruction to remain.
Canonical works
- Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick (1965)
- Screen Test: Lou Reed (1966)
- Screen Test: Dennis Hopper (1964)
- ~472 films total across ~189 sitters
The Vela take
The Vela take: the method asks what a face does when it is looked at for longer than a face is usually looked at. Vela inherits the question; the medium is not currently ours to reproduce.
Context
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Our reinterpretations
No reinterpretations are live in the library yet for this method. The pipeline is registered in lib/derivatives/treatments/warhol-screen-tests.ts; curator-promoted units will appear here as they ship.