Few artists have been as endlessly re-filmed, re-cast and re-mythologised as Andy Warhol. This month, Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol returns to cinemas in a new 4K restoration to mark its 30th anniversary - a fitting moment to look back at the wider body of film that has tried, again and again, to capture a man who spent his life building a surface too reflective to see through.
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)
Harron's debut feature, which premiered at Sundance before screening at Cannes, tells the story of Valerie Solanas, the SCUM Manifesto author who shot Warhol at the Factory in 1968. Lili Taylor's performance as Solanas anchors a film that, notably, refuses to sensationalise its subject or her victim. Jared Harris plays Warhol with an eerie, withdrawn precision, while the production design and Ellen Kuras's cinematography recreate the Factory's mix of glamour and grime. Newly restored by Janus Films and back in theatres this June, the film remains one of the few Warhol-adjacent works made by someone determined to understand its subjects rather than simply display them and was recently reported in The Guardian.
Basquiat (1996)
Released the same year, Julian Schnabel's Basquiat approaches the Factory from another angle, centring on Warhol's friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. David Bowie's performance as Warhol - mannered, watchful, oddly tender - became one of the most widely seen screen versions of the artist, even if the film's primary interest lies with Basquiat's rise and unravelling. It's a useful companion piece to Harron's film: where I Shot Andy Warhol shows Warhol as a target, Basquiat shows him as a kind of guardian, however imperfect, to a younger artist he saw something of himself in.
Factory Girl (2006)
George Hickenlooper's biopic of Edie Sedgwick, with Sienna Miller in the lead and Guy Pearce as Warhol, leans further into tabloid territory than either of the above. It was, and remains, a contested film - criticised on release for its handling of Sedgwick's relationship with Bob Dylan (thinly fictionalised as "Musician") and for flattening Warhol into something closer to caricature. Still, it captures a real appetite for Factory mythology, and a sense of how quickly Warhol's circle could make and discard its stars.
The Documentaries
Warhol has been at least as well served by nonfiction film. Chuck Workman's Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990) was an early, comprehensive attempt at a screen biography, built from interviews with family, gallerists and Factory regulars alongside figures like Dennis Hopper. Catherine O'Sullivan Shorr's Andy Warhol's Factory People, compiled from a 2008 television series, draws on fifty hours of interviews to build an oral history of the Silver Factory years.
The most significant recent addition is Andrew Rossi's The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022), a six-part Netflix series built around Pat Hackett's edited transcriptions of Warhol's spoken diaries. Where earlier documentaries tended to circle Warhol's public persona, Rossi's series goes after the private man - his relationships with Jed Johnson, Jon Gould and Basquiat - and was notable for the access it secured from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Despite respecting the myth of the artist, the series goes further than most into unexplored territory to get at the truth of the man, and several of Warhol's own circle have spoken about how unexpectedly affecting they found it.
Warhol as Filmmaker
No account of Warhol on film is complete without Warhol behind the camera. Between 1963 and 1968, he made hundreds of films at the Factory - static, unedited, often confrontational. Sleep (1964), over five hours of John Giorno sleeping, and Chelsea Girls (1966), screened in split-screen, were both radical departures from anything cinema had done before, treating the camera as a recording instrument rather than a storytelling one. These films shaped a strand of structural and slow cinema that runs well beyond the art world, and they're a reminder that Warhol's relationship with the moving image wasn't only as a subject - he was one of the medium's genuine, if unruly, innovators.
A Legend That Keeps Being Retold
Taken together, these films describe an artist who has proved almost impossible to finally pin down on screen - alternately victim, mentor, icon, void and provocateur, depending on who's holding the camera. That instability is, in its way, very Warhol: an artist who built a career out of surfaces, repetition and controlled ambiguity, and who seems to generate new readings every time someone points a lens at him.
It's a useful frame for looking at the work itself. With I Shot Andy Warhol back in cinemas, and a select group of Warhol works currently available at Andipa, there's a timely opportunity to see the art in person, away from the screen versions of the man who made it. We would be delighted to arrange a viewing for anyone interested.
