Program 4: Screen Tests + Blow Job

Screen Tests [Reel 16: Paul America, Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Ruth Ford, Harold Stevenson, Henry Rago, Nico, Alan Solomon, Jack Smith, Ethel Scull]
Andy Warhol, 1964–66, 16mm, 30m

Blow Job
Andy Warhol, 1964, 16mm, 41m

Andy Warhol produced hundreds of screen tests—each the length of a single 100-foot roll of film—in his studio between 1964 and 1966. The subjects of these studies included some of the most significant artists, writers, and filmmakers of the period, as well any number of Factory denizens who have slipped through the cracks of art history. The Screen Tests, Callie Angell once argued, “may be viewed as a series of allegorical documentaries about what it is like to sit for your portrait, with each poser trapped in the existential dilemma of performing as—while simultaneously being reduced to—his or her own image.”

Blow Job, a film far more frequently alluded to than actually seen, bears some correspondence with these works. It, too, silently frames a single face with a stationary camera, though for far longer, and with the eponymous act being performed off-screen. There is an extraordinary beauty to the close-up of Blow Job, the figure’s reactions slowed down by the silent-speed projection, but the film has also been noted as a clever provocation: a sex film that visibly elides sex, thereby frustrating porngoers and vice squads alike.