So 18fps plus sound. Not so much an homage to Warhol as an homage to
Youtube! LOL. At least with Youtube you can turn off the sound. No
sets of ear plugs can do that as completely, and sometimes the bass
from the speakers hits you in the gut anyway and creates a whole
other unwanted experience even with earplugs. That is how I was
forced to sit though the Sistiaga hand painted film with atrocious
noise. Echhhhhh! One of the worst cinema experiences of my life.
Myron Ort
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
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