The Chelsea Girls
With Nico, Ondine, Brigid Berlin.
US, 1966, 16mm, color and b&w, 210 min.
Perhaps Warhol’s best-known film and one of the masterpieces of avant-garde cinema, The Chelsea Girls combines twelve “portraits” of Factory Superstars into one contrapuntal underground fugue, in which two 16mm films are projected side by side. The line between performance and reality is impossible to draw as Brigid Berlin shoots up with amphetamines and Ondine, seemingly cast as the Pope, angrily assaults another of the Superstars. Other sequences include “The Gerard Malanga Story” and “Hanoi Hanna,” featuring Mary Waronov and International Velvet. Originally conceived as documents from various rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, references to actual room numbers in which the sequences unfold were removed after the venerable establishment threatened a lawsuit.