CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/5/2018

An epic movie-novel: Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls

"What is The Chelsea Girls?" Jonas Mekas asked in his September 29, 1966, review in The Village Voice. "It is Warhol's most ambitious work to date. It is also probably his most important work to date. It is an epic movie-novel. During the four hours that the movie lasts a huge gallery of people pass by, a gallery of complex lives, faces, fates… Many strange lives open before our eyes, some of them enacted, some real—but always very real, even when they are fake—since this is the Chelsea Hotel of our fantasy, of our mind. Lovers, dope addicts, pretenders, homosexuals, sad, fragile girls, and hard, tough girls—quiet conversations, doing nothing, telephone conversations, passing the time; social games, drug games, sex games… The film in its complex and overlapping structure, in its simultaneity of lives before our eyes, comes closest to Joyce. Forgive me this sacrilegious comparison—really, this is the first time that I dare mention Joyce in connection with cinema. This is the first time that I see in cinema an interesting solution of narrative techniques that enable cinema to present life in the complexity and richness achieved by modern literature."