Andy Warhol Cinema

On the same day, I had visited the Andy Warhol Cinema. It was very quiet and dim with many different screens but it did not look like a cinema.

    First, I went to the corner. There were many televisions and earphones. The video in the televisions were that some people were talking or someone had a speech for about 15-20 minutes. Those screens were magnified and focused on their faces. In the videos, I explored that, when people were talking, there are many unobserved small emotions on their face.

     Then I walked to the front. There was a big screen showing a video of some people playing and having conversations for also about 15-20 minutes. However, it was silent so that we could only observe their motions and movements by eyes. I found that the director Andy had used some color effects on the video to make it be differently and we would see it with different feelings. It is because we didn't know that what was the content of the video, colors showed different motions.

Then, I went to the side of that big screen. There were two screens. One screen showed that two women standing far from each other and they moved separately. Another one showed theirs heads, which moved same but they looked standing closely. It is because Andy used different angles to close up the women’s face and look like they were close to each other.

     There were still a set of videos. There were many closed-up of faces with black and white screen. They were all quiet but moving and looking at the camera. That was mysterious as they were just like looking at me and really people standing in front of me.

 

     Finally, there was a big screen in front of the main entrance showing one couple kissing for about 15 minutes long. It focused on the movement of their mouth and they really enjoyed the moment.

     Andy’s style was simple but aesthetic. Andy was daring to try out new shooting methods to improve the existing shooting techniques that time. Those videos were his experiments of shooting movies. Most of them were focusing on people’s motions so that they didn't include the sound. For the experiments, people in the videos needed to repeat same movements for 15-20 minutes long. That was hard. I think that the videos were dexterous and shadowy, shy and shining, looming over. They let us thought that we were staying still and moving on in space and time. He did a great effort on it and he was arguably the most influential artist of the late 20^th century.