Event

Chelsea Girls

Guest Speaker: Dr. Kenneth Wayne, Chief Curator at the Heckscher Museum of Art

Enjoy a rare screening of Andy Warhol's iconic film The Chelsea Girls, shown in its original format, with two projectors running simultaneously. By turns exquisite, maddening, thrilling and addictive, The Chelsea Girls is an extraordinary work. An unlikely hit in 1966, dubbed "the Iliad of the underground" by Newsweek, Warhol's film takes a keyhole view into the famous Chelsea Hotel. Its clamoring clan of divas, queens, and hustlers play out high melodrama theatrics, which oscillate between the phantasmagoric and the glorious, between desperation and poise, between reality and fiction. Many of Warhol's "superstars" are featured in the film including Nico, Ondine, International Velvet, Brigid Berlin, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar. Warhol separated the film into 12 vignettes which are projected side-by-side. As the projectors cannot be completely synchronized, no two screenings of the film are ever the same. USA, 1966, 195 min.