The Nude Restaurant

United States

1967

115 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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CAST Brigid Berlin, Julian Burrough, Taylor Mead, Allen Midgette, Ingrid Superstar, Viva, Louis Waldon

At a New York City restaurant, the patrons are men, nude but for a G-string, waited on by one woman, also clad in a G-string (played by Viva) and a G-bestringed (bestrung?) waiter. Some of the “nude” patrons leave the establishment, their places taken by new customers, also nearly in the buff. There are numerous in-camera jump cuts (known as ‘strobe cuts’) and the camera weaves around a bit. The waiter and waitress move from table to table, talking to the customers. Taylor Mead sits smirking at the fountain, where eventually he partakes in a long conversation with Viva about her Catholic childhood. Viva, the waitress if not the actual person, seemingly is obsessed with the subject of lascivious priests. There is more strobe cutting and at one point, Viva turns to the camera and asks that it be turned off. The camera is turned off and, after an interlude, is turned back on again, after which Viva continues with her monologue. More patrons arrive while others go, perhaps thinking – if not speaking – of Michelangelo. –IMDb

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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