Silence

Silence (p33)

Silence, Koch discusses Warhol's phase as a film-maker (1963-66) where at this point of his career he was working predominately making silent films, in black and white. Although there are plenty of films to chose from, such as kiss, 1 hour, Eat, 45 minutes and Empire State Building- 8 hours. Koch's main focus is the infamous 'sleep'-6 hours of a man (John Giorno) sleeping. Koch says 'these films were among Warhol's most brilliantly successful and important...when the silents were made, they were accompanied by a 'word of mouth' report throughout New York', further they were films to be talked about...and the obscure reason behind this was that people did not have to go to see them.

However further on Koch states, as the screenings began to be know, an audience developed, these were he says,' film makers and their friends,stars of the films and friends of friends' Of Sleep, very few people were able to sit through it, at early screenings, Koch states; 'they came forewarned, to make an evening of it, chat with friends, leave and return, and all the time the film remains on the screen....its time dissociated from that of the audience, the image glows up there stately and independently' .. 'if one only glances at the image from time to time, it plunges one into a cinematic profundity, (emotional depth) in a single stroke the image effects complete transformation of all temporal modes associated with looking at a movie'  

Sleep (Koch p40) has its own temporal pace, a different form our own, we slip in and out at our own will our time being our own and perhaps by the clock's. Koch states; 'what is sleep....but our nightly release from the clocks prison, filled and flashing with the dreaming motions of the mind and yet a immobility, a quietude in which seconds and hours are confounded'. (confused) and this he says is..'what we gaze at so voyeuristically in 'Sleep' bound to the unchanging clock of the cameras mechanical eye. 

Note: associations with prior research to Hillary Lloyd's work, the camera acts like her eye, and her gaze is exacting and intense. She allows her subjects to perform for the camera....associates to Fishers POV, Kinocinema and Baudry (1974) argument that ‘cinema worked through identifications not only with characters in the movies, but also with the position of the camera’. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Rope (1929), and The Birds (1963) among others, are significant examples of characters representing the spectator’s side of the screen. 

To continue; voyeurism appears to play an important role in all of Warhol's film's, Koch suggests that 'he is the man who distances himself'...he is the one who waits...not missing the smallest detail, the one who see's..and by defining himself as someone whose presence must remain unknown, as the one who not there...viewed psychoanalytically, the voyeur is somebody who distances ones self from human contact, living out the characters role through the mechanism of camera's eye, hidden in the darkness of the cinema's auditorium. Furthermore; the camera takes the place of the absent voyeur, it is the witnessing and recording eye. We the audience sit a distance from the screen and the ''language Koch suggests (p44) is filled with image held within the distance of silence, a decorative disjunction of time, in the nearness and remoteness of film mingling in an experience of the person revealed and withheld at once' ...Watching the film you understand this notion at once, I am there next to this man, but then I am not, the equipment (laptop, the sound it creates presents the threshold. I do not know him but there is punctum, although this could be argued as Barthes suggests that there is no punctum in moving image (camera lucida) but I guess the image is so slowed down it has become on the verge of photographic image*..

Warhols 'Sleep' 1936

*Mulveys new book Stillness in moving image, death 24x a second takes this concept further by looking at newtechnologies that have the ability to slow down and stop old films, creating new ways of seeing and thinking about an image...i plan to get this book. she also has a talk Monday 18th February, Jerwood, London  http://tomorrowneverknows.org.uk/events