Critics reviews

As the film drags on, you start to realize you're doing your own "editing" based on which reel you're looking at, which characters you're following, or how often you're checking your watch. It's as fascinating an experiment on screen as off.

Even in its housebroken form, THE CHELSEA GIRLS is still a wild experience, heavily influenced by the whims and sympathies of the projectionist... The whole thing is staggering and exhausting, like we're forcibly ensconced in some surveillance state hivemind: we eavesdrop on one amphetamine-fueled rant after another, our eyes wandering away to the queer doings next door and back again.

The results are often spellbinding; the juxtaposition of two film images at once gives the spectator an unusual amount of freedom in what to concentrate on and what to make of these variously whacked-out performers.

Whether you consider Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls to be fiction or document, it is an event, a rupture in the history of the cinema and an attack on the morality implicit in the image. Chelsea Girls is a monster born in the mind of a dilettante who puts the technical extremism of a Godard to the service of a moral metaphysics of a de Sade. An infernal machine puts on the screen a universe which only obeys its own laws.

Warhol doesn't exploit depravity as much as he certifies it. Most pornography is antierotic because of the crudity of its certification, but Chelsea Girls isn't even pornographic. The flashes of male Caucasian nudity depress the viewer with intimations of a pitiful passivity. Warhol has refined the old Hollywood tease into a kind of tepid torture in which organisms talk away their orgasms.