Andy Warhol, was a modern Pop artist who took the modern world of commercialism and celebrity worship as his main points of interest and created paintings and visual art works that are celebrated all over the world. Not that long ago I went to an exposition of his work at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He also made countless experimental films. 1965’s, “Vinyl” is one of them. The movie is based on Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel, “A Clockwork orange”, a full six years before Stanley Kubrick made his masterpiece from the same source. What Warhol does here is place his camera on a tripod and spaces the entire 70-minute running time in a small claustrophobic corner of his Manhattan studio. I think he only moved the camera twice or three times throughout the entire movie. Some simple scenes go on and on in excruciating fashion that I thought they would never end. The entire movie was shot in one day. The novel’s, Alex becomes Victor, who brags about being bad and then gets the brainwashing treatment tied to a chair and stating out loud the scenes of violence he is forced to watch as part of his treatment. During the treatment he wears some sort of mask that I guess somewhat resembles the mask used on the Alex of Kubrick’s film, but that is as far as I am willing to go in comparing the two movies. Ignore anything you may have heard about the opening shot of this film, as regardless to the fact that it starts with a close-up of Victor, it has absolutely nothing in common with Kubrick’s iconic zoom-out opening from his movie. In Warhol’s movie, there are characters wondering around in the background corners of the one existing scene, doing strange unrelated movements and actions, such as a sort of S & M relationship between two men and a woman who sits, and dances on the side, who I am told was never even aware she was being filmed. The audio is barely audible and I had to stress myself in order to understand what was being said by some of the worse acting I have every witnessed. This is a static and tedious filming method that works to force its audience to look for anything of interest besides its central story. It worked in making me wonder and look at the background characters, in an effort to not fall asleep. This was not an easy task. It was obvious that no script was used and the so called actors ad-libbed their lines based on the situation given to them. The result looks and sounds horrible and can only be described as being an experimental piece of trash.
1001 Movies before you die 