The Remains of the Underground
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He correctly avoids the epic task of trying to write about all of Warhol’s work and instead focuses on several key moments, including Blow Job (1964) and The Chelsea Girls (1966). Crimp’s passion for the films seeps through every line of this exhaustively researched book. The experience of seeing Chelsea Girls, he writes, “changed my life. Very soon after I saw it, in 1967, I quit school [and]moved to New York City.” Indeed, some of the book reads like memoir.

Crimp derived the book’s title from a famous Warhol quotation, in which the artist was responding to a question that was nagging fans of his work: How, precisely, do we categorize these films? “We didn’t think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just ‘Our kind of movie.’”

The quote speaks to Warhol’s brazen, take-no-prisoners attitude—fuck ’em if they don’t get the joke—and the accompanying filmmaking style. Nineteen sixty-three’s Blow Job, as Crimp notes, is a 41-minute film in which we see the image of a man’s facial expressions, apparently as someone is going down on him. Empire (1964) is an eight-hour-and-five-minute shot of the Empire State Building—in slow-motion, no less. Crimp’s book reminds us that Warhol’s work did not just play in Soho lofts and coffee houses; Chelsea Girls “was shown commercially throughout the United States, Canada and Europe,” all the more miraculous, he concludes, given that it’s “a three-and-a-half-hour, split-screen, non-narrative movie about a bunch of queers and junkies at a seedy residential hotel in what was then not an upscale New York neighborhood.”

Not surprisingly, Crimp delves into Sontag’s famous essay on camp and her eventual disdain for it—“It’s a big bore,” she would later write—pondering whether or not she was correct in her definition of camp and her assessment of Warhol.

Crimp punctuates the book with a potent argument, convincingly suggesting that in a digital age—when the length of a film reel has become irrelevant—Warhol’s work makes more sense than ever. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Warhol’s films that people often cite as the most strik- ing—and abrasive—is their sheer length, and the fact that they’re such an affront to ordinary expectations, lacking a narrative thread, for example. Crimp describes recently bingeing on a number of Warhol films with a close friend at the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center. “On the simplest level,” he recalls, “we had become completely relaxed about how much time was passing and not at all impatient at the films’ usually long-seeming duration. We felt at that moment as if we could go on watching Warhol films for days on end and continue to enjoy the experience thoroughly. Our time … had become Warhol’s time.”

Crimp’s book works so well because he maintains his attention to detail—including critical responses to the films at the time of their release—while assessing the larger themes and ideas running through Warhol’s œuvre. He also manages to apply academic rigor to his analysis, simultaneously conveying his own deeply personal responses to the work, including some hilarious anecdotes. It’s an entirely pleasing mix, and it’s the kind of non-ironic tribute that Warhol’s brilliant, deeply ironic films deserve.