TheScreen Tests are a series ofshort,silent,black-and-white film portraits byAndy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. TheScreen 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 theScreen 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.[1] Warhol'sScreen Tests connect on one hand with the artist's other work in film, which emphasized stillness and duration (for example,Sleep (1964) andEmpire (1965), and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.[2]: 12–13
TheScreen Tests were initially inspired by a 1962 New York City Police Department booklet entitledThe Thirteen Most Wanted, which showed mug shots of wanted criminals.[2]: 13 The same booklet was the source of the images in Warhol's short-lived mural entitledThirteen Most Wanted Men at the1964 New York World's Fair, together with a series of paintings using the same images. A second source for theScreen Tests was Warhol's interest inphoto-booth portraits, which he had begun to use in 1963 for paintings such asEthel Scull 36 Times.[2]: 13 Like theScreen Tests, photo-booth portraits document the appearance of a sitter across successive moments in time.
In January, 1964, around the time he was working with the police booklet images to design the World's Fair mural, Warhol shot a series of short moving-image portraits of young men, the film canisters of which were labeled—in a riff on the booklet title—13 Most Beautiful. The firstScreen Tests were made at the house ofWinthrop Kellogg Edey, one of the subjects in13 Most Beautiful.[2]: 13, 70 Each film is as long as the 100-foot length of film in the magazines for Warhol'sBolex movie camera (about three minutes), and shows a single subject presented in the style of the brochure's mug shots: from the neck up, with a featureless background, facing forward, with the portrait filling the frame from top to bottom. The subjects were generally directed by Warhol to hold perfectly still and not blink for the three-minute duration of the filming.[3]
After making these early shorts, Warhol began to incorporate the shooting ofScreen Tests into the routine of his studio,The Factory, alongside the making of new paintings and other aspects of his enterprise. The filming ofScreen Tests was rarely prearranged. There was an area set up for shooting, but the decision to make one was spontaneous, generally involving people who happened to be visiting The Factory.[2]: 15 Nearly all of theScreen Tests use the nearly motionless, front-facing style of the first films. Warhol varied the shooting conditions for individual films, changing the number of lights or their angles to alter the pattern of shadow on the subjects' faces and the backdrops behind them or using different lens aperture settings. Some subjects sat for multipleScreen Tests on a single day. By the end of 1966, two years after his firstScreen Tests, Warhol had produced at least 500 of them, of which 472 survive.[4]
The short films were not calledScreen Tests until the end of 1965; until that time, Warhol labeled them "film portraits" or "stillies" (aportmanteau of "still-movies").[2]: 15 They were not screen tests in the general sense of the film industry, in that they were conceived as independent works of art and not a way of choosing people to act in a production.[5] Warhol made two longer films in 1965,Screen Test #1 andScreen Test #2, that more closely resemble traditional screen tests.
Film critic Philip Dodd listed theScreen Tests among his favorite films in 2002 when he voted for theSight and Sound poll.[6]
AuthorKate Zambreno wrote about the screen tests in a 2019 collection of essays titledScreen Tests: Stories and Other Writing.[7]
Many of the 472 survivingScreen Tests depict people who remain well known for their accomplishments or for their association with Warhol's circle. Following is a selection of people who appeared inScreen Tests who are also the subject of Wikipedia articles, chosen to give an overview of the range of Warhol's subjects. The definitive compilation of theScreen Tests and their subjects isAndy Warhol Screen Tests by Callie Angell (2006), the first volume of thecatalogue raisoneė of Warhol's films.
