Chelsea Girls

Omar Diop

1. Chelsea Girls was co-directed by Warhol and Paul Morrissey.

A convenient and traditional way of defining the cinema is that ‘it takes us out the world in which we live in order to transport us to a different world, that of film.’ Chelsea Girls is at once much simpler and much more complex. It is, in itself, a perfectly homogenous and self-sufficient world. It is, however, radically different from any other film, because it starts from a position which is its functioning principle, CAMERA = GOD. For Spinoza all ethical propositions are developments of the position, GOD = SUBSTANCE. For Warhol all images flow from the axiom CAMERA = GOD.

But what does that mean? The camera is no longer merely a bit of technical equipment. It is the norm. In the formal universe of the cinema, it means that ‘the camera is that which is determined by nothing but itself.’ The camera is the equivalent of substance in Spinoza’s system, since it is what is permanent in the film. The people and objects in the film are no more than the attributes or modes of the substance, passing deformations, undulations on an imperturbable road. This is the essential cinematic vision in Chelsea Girls. Proof of it is the almost complete absence of editing in the film. A shot lasts for twenty minutes, content to arrange and construct a cinematic discourse purely with the film’s rhythm. This alone is sufficient matter for reflection by past and future filmmakers.

Whereas Hitchcock makes use of the treasures of his imagination and technical ability to construct a shot, Warhol eliminates all this technical sophistication. His primitive technique consists in simply positioning the camera somewhere vaguely central, opening rather than setting the diaphragm, focusing, approximately, and letting the film run.

No one who has read Spinoza will find this extraordinary, for he points out that, ‘liberty is necessity understood well.’ Warhol applies this idea to the image’s interior necessity. Technique becomes aesthetic, because the continuous shot, which lasts as long as the reel, accepts the camera’s own logic. In order to continue to respect this logic, the image must not be an a priori construction of the filmmaker. The camera must be given the task of actualising the image in the same way a piano actualises the idea of the pianist.

All this is quite comprehensible if one accepts the initial postulate of CAMERA = GOD, i.e. that which is determined by nothing but itself. The filmmaker cannot allow himself to interfere with the essential structure of the image, because if he does, he risks altering the purity of the cinematic language by the introduction of another language. This is, perhaps, the most monstrous aspect of the film. Warhol does not use the camera as an instrument. He is, on the contrary, its servant, content to procure its objects which it can devour. He cannot even be accused of realism, since he does not pretend that he is presenting objects or meaningful aspects of any particular reality. It is this characteristic which makes Chelsea Girls an experimental film and not, as one could believe, because it is a sensational documentary.

Warhol tries to free himself from a mode of representation which the cinema might well consider to be its own, as well as from any other existant mode of representation. The film is, in fact, the very negation of realism, or of documentary realism. It releases a succession of autonomous structures. What is offered to the camera’s eye is only of secondary importance. (I hope that after Chelsea Girls no one will ever again ask me: ‘What is the film about?’) A film is always about itself; it makes use of other things, e.g. characters, objects, etc. Andy Warhol is a genius, because he dares to let the film run in order to see what will happen. But whatever he may say, the film evokes phenomena which exist outside its strict framework.

There is, first of all, a very special rhythm in Chelsea Girls, a Sadic slowness. It makes you think of fleeing in a nightmare. Someone is chasing you. You run, but your legs will not move fast enough. You fall, get up, and fall again in a movement of inexorable anguish. It is amazing how many of the monotonous camera movements, which animate the two screens, bring an instrument of torture to mind, a rack moved by drops of water. In the closed universe of the Chelsea Hotel, the camera, like a sweet emanation from Hell, rolls on. And it is not hard to understand why he chose this sort of marginal, Village humanity. Warhol could easily have placed the eye of his voracious god in a fishing village on the Gulf, if he were not afraid that the cinematic discourse would get lost behind the ethnology. For the sake of the clarity and validity of his experience, he had to show something which totally, or, at least, in large part, went beyond the officially accepted ways of thinking, speaking and acting. This was the best way of demonstrating that the cinema, as it is, can do things that no other language can do.

The residents of the Chelsea Hotel are not the objects of a sociological investigation. They are never introduced. We know neither how they got there or from where they came. They are only seen, and in this sense they can be considered as the first purely cinematic characters of the cinema’s short history. The only nature they possess is given to them by the film. They are images, only images. They can only communicate through the camera. Which makes them say things and which suggests the meaning of their words. The Chelsea Hotel is surely the modern equivalent of the Divine Marquis’ chateau. It is, perhaps, even more frightening, because in the Chelsea Hotel there is no longer even any need to justify one’s acts. They are autonomous and self-sufficient.

For a long time a girl cuts the hair on her forehead, very slowly. She smiles at a child, hugs him, and starts to cut again. From time to time the camera leaves her torso to wander down her trousers or onto the stove. The scissors, her hair, her breasts, her slacks, the electric stove are all of equal importance. All objects for the camera. Ingrid enters shot to kneel in front of the Pope of the Village. Confession, psychoanalytic relationship, it does not matter, much less, at least, than Ingrid’s superb tics.