Blow Job Revisited

Sorry for the out of order posts, after this I will stop. I don't feel as though I can attack or defend Andy Warhol's Blow Job. Both have been done--we're over it. Yes it was boring. I couldn't help thinking, 'Wow, this is taking forever...' as I was watching it. And that was pretty much the point. Warhol was totally interested in the temporal axis, in investigating film's nuances as a medium and the characteristics that make it unique. Although the guy in the film probably got more out of it than I did, it was NEW and totally obsessed with the passage of time, and that's what really mattered to this structuralist film movement. It's interesting how Warhol slowed the number of frames per second to a crawl when thinking back to filmmakers like Breer who were pushing the human eye past its limits by speeding up the pace of the film. I like the way Blow Job forces you to pay close attention to what is happening because of the sheer lack of action and movement. Each blink of the man's eye and the tilt of his head is a major happening within the context of this film. The shadows he creates unintentionally add to the chirascuro happening in the basic shot, which adds to the overall mood of the film and its interest in low-lifeness. Reading the interview with Warhol actually made me a little more annoyed with this film, just because of the randomosity that he was spewing about his views as a filmmaker and the fast pace with which he was making films at the time. It almost felt as though individual films like this one didn't count for much in his crazy whirlwind world of film exploration. I guess his inability to speak clearly about his work and even to take it seriously made me a little more skeptical of the value of an experiment in time like Blow Job.