Outer and Inner Space

United States

1965

33 Min

Black and White

English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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Outer and Inner Space is a 16mm film of Edie Sedgwick sitting in front of a television monitor on which is playing a prerecorded videotape of herself. On the videotape, Edie is positioned on the left side of the frame, facing right; she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our right. In the film, the “real” or “live” Edie Sedgwick is seated on the right side of the film frame, with her video image behind her, and she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our left. The effect of this setup is that it sometimes creates the rather strange illusion that we are watching Edie in conversation with her own video image. The film is two reels long, each reel is 1,200 feet or 33 minutes long, and the videotapes playing within the film are each 30 minutes long. The two film reels are projected side by side, with reel One on the left and reel Two on the right, and with sound on both reels. So what you see are four heads, alternating video/film, video/film, and sometimes all four heads are talking at once. (Callie Angell)

Director

Andy Warhol

American pop artist Andy Warhol became a pop icon himself, symbolizing the wild decadence of the “beautiful people” of the 1970s. Born Andrew Warhola in Pennsylvania, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before designing advertisements for women’s shoes. After gaining notoriety for his pop-art renditions of things such as Campbell’s Soup cans and silk screens of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol began making experimental films during the early ‘60s. Most of his early works were little more than passive chronicles of the ordinary. For example, in the film Sleep, he simple recorded a man sleeping for several hours. Such endeavors were heralded as groundbreaking by other experimental filmmakers, but the public and most critics generally regarded them as wastes of film, and their time. Still, Warhol continued making these plotless films until he eventually began adding crude soundtracks and sketchy scripts. Many of these films are filled with his “players”: the beautiful people, “freaks… read more

American pop artist Andy Warhol became a pop icon himself, symbolizing the wild decadence of the “beautiful people” of the 1970s. Born Andrew Warhola in Pennsylvania, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before designing advertisements for women’s shoes. After gaining notoriety for his pop-art renditions of things such as Campbell’s Soup cans and silk screens of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol began making experimental films during the early ‘60s. Most of his early works were little more than passive chronicles of the ordinary. For example, in the film Sleep, he simple recorded a man sleeping for several hours. Such endeavors were heralded as groundbreaking by other experimental filmmakers, but the public and most critics generally regarded them as wastes of film, and their time. Still, Warhol continued making these plotless films until he eventually began adding crude soundtracks and sketchy scripts. Many of these films are filled with his “players”: the beautiful people, “freaks,” and wealthy dilettantes that constantly surrounded the artist and his “Factory,” an art studio he founded in 1962. His films became a form of cinéma vérité, a voyeur’s delight of strange people doing equally strange things. Some of the players Warhol turned into underground celebrities included Candy Darling, Viva, Holly Woodlawn, and Ingrid Superstar. Simply playing versions of themselves, they left the viewer to decide if they were, in fact, real people or simply fantastical figures. Many of Warhol’s films were centered on sex and death, and the sex in his films was often explicit and transcended traditional gender boundaries. In 1968, Warhol was wounded by a disgruntled Factory reject, an incident which inspired the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. While healing, he began to withdraw from filmmaking, closed the Factory, and turned the reins of his operation over to filmmakers such as Paul Morrissey, who helped make subsequent movies more commercially accessible. Morrissey was behind Warhol’s best known films Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, both of which were shot while in Rome in 1973. Although Warhol never fully recovered from the attempt on his life and had stopped making films, he did continue his voyeurism of the strange lives of his illustrious friends via the Polaroid camera he carried with him until he died in 1987 from complications following surgery. –allmovie guide

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