Blow Job (1964 film)

Last updated
Blow Job
Directed by Andy Warhol
Produced byAndy Warhol
Starring DeVeren Bookwalter
Release date
  • 1964 (1964)
Running time
35 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageSilent film

Blow Job is a 1964 American silent film directed by Andy Warhol. It depicts the face of an uncredited DeVeren Bookwalter as he apparently receives fellatio from an unseen partner. While shot at 24 frames per second, Warhol specified that it should be projected at 16 frames per second, [1] slowing it down by a third.

Contents

Despite the salacious title, the film shows only the expression on the young man's face; the implied sexual act itself is not seen. Whether it is a male or a female performing the act is not stated, and the viewer must assume that fellatio is occurring. The salaciousness has also been speculated to be entirely in the title with no fellatio actually being performed.

Making

The identity of the person performing the act is disputed. Warhol states in his book Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) that five different boys performed the fellatio. In this book, Warhol writes that he originally asked Charles Rydell, the boyfriend of filmmaker Jerome Hill, to star in the film, promising that there would be "five beautiful boys" to perform the act. [2]

However, when Warhol set up the film shoot at The Factory on a Sunday, Rydell failed to show up. Warhol phoned Rydell at Hill's suite at the Algonquin Hotel and asked where Rydell was. Rydell replied that he thought Warhol was kidding, and had no intention of appearing in such a film. When he declined, Andy used "a good-looking kid that happened to be hanging around the Factory that day", who was later identified as Bookwalter. By that time, the five boys had departed, but Warhol's notoriously poor memory kept the five boys in place for the version given in the much later book POPism.[ citation needed ]

Commentary

According to Peter Gidal, the film distances the viewer from the experience it purportedly depicts, "Sometimes the young actor looks bored, sometimes as if he is thinking, sometimes as if he is aware of the camera, sometimes as if he is not." [3] Douglas Crimp states that after a few minutes, "it becomes clear that we will see nothing more than the repetition, with slight variations, of what we've already seen". This frees the mind to look in a different way. Likewise, the sexual act has the effect of distracting the actor from the presence of the camera, creating a unique kind of unself-consciousness. The film becomes "a lesson in how to produce a really beautiful portrait without saying 'cheese'!" [4]

Critic Roy Grundmann argues that "Blow Job‘s self-reflexive devices create a new kind of spectatorial address that dislodges audiences from their contemplative positions in a number of ways. Blow Job‘s reflexivity makes spectators intensely aware that seeing a film makes projecting onto and investing into an image a part of oneself which is also a socialized acculturated act". Grundmann further claims that "viewers oscillate between an awareness of their contingency on larger scheme and the promise of ocularcentric mastery of the image". [5]

Sequel: Eating Too Fast

In 1966, Warhol filmed a sequel, Eating Too Fast (originally titled Blow Job #2) which runs 67 minutes with sound. It features art critic and writer Gregory Battcock as the recipient.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andy Warhol</span> American artist, film director, and producer (1928–1987)

Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Factory</span> Andy Warhols New York City studio

The Factory was Andy Warhol's studio in Manhattan, New York City, which had four locations between 1963 and 1987. The Factory became famed for its parties in the 1960s. It was the hip hangout spot for artists, musicians, celebrities, and Warhol's superstars. The original Factory was often referred to as the Silver Factory. In the studio, Warhol's workers would make silkscreens and lithographs under his direction.

<i>Empire</i> (1965 film) 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol

Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Dallesandro</span> American actor

Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro III is an American actor and Warhol superstar. He was a sex symbol of gay subculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and of several American underground films before going mainstream.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erotic humiliation</span> Consensual use of humiliation in a sexual context

Erotic humiliation or Sexual humiliation is a consensual psychological humiliation performed in order to produce erotic excitement or sexual arousal. This can be for either the person(s) being humiliated and demeaned or the person(s) humiliating, or both. It is sometimes performed before spectators, including through pornography and webcam modeling. It may be part of BDSM and other sexual roleplay, or accompanied by the sexual stimulation of the genitals of one or both parties in the activity.

<i>Andy Warhols Bad</i> 1977 film by Jed Johnson

Bad, also known as Andy Warhol's Bad, is a 1977 comedy film directed by Jed Johnson and starring Carroll Baker, Perry King, and Susan Tyrrell. It was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, and was the last film produced by Andy Warhol before his death in 1987.

<i>Blue Movie</i> 1969 film by Andy Warhol

Blue Movie is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States, and is regarded as a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984), which, before the legalization of pornography in Denmark on July 1, 1969, started on June 12, 1969 with the release of Blue Movie at the Elgin Theater, and later, the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre, in New York City. Blue Movie helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon, in which porn was publicly discussed by celebrities and taken seriously by film critics, in modern American culture, and shortly thereafter, in many other countries throughout the world. According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris, an internationally controversial erotic drama film starring Marlon Brando and released a few years after Blue Movie was made. Viva and Louis Waldon, playing themselves, starred in Blue Movie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibbe Hansen</span> American actress

Bibbe Hansen is an American performance artist, musician and actress.

<i>Screen Tests</i>

The Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits by Andy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. The Screen Tests, of which 472 survive, depict a wide range of figures, many of them part of the mid-1960s downtown New York cultural scene. Under Warhol's direction, subjects of the Screen Tests attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed, with the resulting movies projected in slow motion. The films represent a new kind of portraiture—a slowly moving, nearly still image of a person. Warhol's Screen Tests connect on one hand with the artist's other work in film, which emphasized stillness and duration (for example, Sleep and Empire, and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exploding Plastic Inevitable</span> Series of multimedia events by Andy Warhol

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes simply called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk events organized by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, such as Eat, and dancing and mime performance art by regulars of Warhol's Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DeVeren Bookwalter</span> American actor and film director (1939–1987)

DeVeren Bookwalter was an American actor and director. He primarily appeared in theater, though he did have several film roles. DeVeren was the first person to win three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for his production, direction, and performance in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Globe Playhouse in 1975.

Beautiful Agony is a paid-subscription erotic website featuring head shots of user-submitted videos showing the participant having orgasms, without providing any visual description of what technique is being used or revealing anything below the neck and upper chest. Men and women are featured on the site.

Eating Too Fast is a 1966 Andy Warhol film made at The Factory. It was originally titled Blow Job #2 and features art critic and writer Gregory Battcock (1937–1980). The film is 67 minutes long and is, in effect, a black and white sound film remake of Warhol's Blow Job (1964). Battcock had previously appeared in Warhol's films Batman Dracula (1964) and Horse (1965).

<i>Mona the Virgin Nymph</i> 1970 American film

Mona is a 1970 American pornographic film directed by Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm, produced by Bill Osco, and starring Judy Angel, Gerard Broulard, Orrin North, Susan Stewart and Fifi Watson. The film was screened without credits due to legal concerns. It is regarded as the second sexually explicit film to receive a general theatrical release in the United States, after Andy Warhol's Blue Movie (1969). However, unlike Blue Movie, Mona had a plot, though there was more emphasis on the action.

Afterall is a nonprofit contemporary art research and publishing organisation. It is based in London, at Central Saint Martins. It publishes the journal Afterall; the book series Readers,One Works and Exhibition Histories.

<i>Kiss</i> (1963 film) 1963 American film

Kiss is a 1963 silent American experimental film directed by Andy Warhol, which runs 50 minutes and features various couples kissing for 3½ minutes each. The film features Naomi Levine, Barbara Rubin, Gerard Malanga, Rufus Collins, Johnny Dodd, Ed Sanders, Mark Lancaster, Fred Herko, Baby Jane Holzer, Robert Indiana, Andrew Meyer, John Palmer, Pierre Restany, Harold Stevenson, Philip van Rensselaer, Charlotte Gilbertson, Marisol, Stephen Holden, Bela Lugosi and unidentified others. It was one of the first films Warhol made at The Factory in New York City.

Blow job or blowjob, a slang word for fellatio, is an act of oral stimulation of a penis.

Thirteen Most Wanted Men was a large 1964 mural created by Andy Warhol for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York. The mural was painted over with silver paint before the fair opened, probably due to official objections, but other reasons have been suggested.

"The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral" is an erotic poem by W. H. Auden. Thought to have been written in 1948, the poem gleefully describes in graphic detail a homosexual encounter involving an act of fellatio.

Ivy Nicholson was an American model and actress.

References

  1. Blow Job Archived December 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  2. Andy Warhol, POPism, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980) pp 64, 65
  3. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol - Blow Job, Afterall Books, 2008, blurb.
  4. Douglas Crimp, Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol, MIT Press, 2012, p.4
  5. Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol's Blow Job, Temple University Press, 2003, p.19

Further reading