Review of Sleep

As a pop culture commercial artist, Andy Warhol has work, in a variety of media outlets. Ranging from painting, music, photography, drawing, filmmaking and sculpture; he has mass produce anything that can be deem as artwork, through a factory-like assembly line. However, not everything from him was well made. Some of these so-called works, are unimpressive and laziness slap together. Don't get me wrong, I love his works with Marilyn Monroe's portrait & his Campbell soup cans; nevertheless, anybody with some eyes can see, that they pretty much, just stenciling copies of previous works from other artists, with minor adjustments, such as different text, color, & shades. Because of that, I think, he's a bit overrated. I don't think, he is the greatest artist that ever live. He's mediocre, at best and he knew it. Warhol's business philosophy for art, was never, about making anything new, complex and grand new to gain sentiment. Instead, it was finding simple, cheap familiar images, and nixing those works, just enough for pretentious art buyers to see value in it, once more. Warhol was only there to play the system & make money. In truth, many critics find Warhol's work as parodies of the growing commercialism around the 20th century. He really did like trolling his audience; into thinking that there is more value in a piece, than it honestly has. One such example is his 1963's documentary 'Sleep'. Influenced by a dance performance by choreographer Yvonne Rainer in which one of the dances in the solo section called 'Terrain' had a small portion of somebody sleeping. 'Sleep' consisting of long take footage of John Giorno, his lover at the time, sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes. The film was one of Warhol's first experiments with filmmaking & no surprised to everybody, it had a troublesome production, even with the simple premise. First off, much of the original footage had to be reshoot, a month later, due to the limitations of his 16mm Bolex camera forcing the film to jump every 20 seconds as Andy rewind it. Secondly, Warhol didn't know, what to do with the short amount of footage, so he just looped together a few shots, in order to give the illusion of a continuous sleeping experience. Sadly, it made for a highly repetitive watch, as badly edited cuts are very noticeable. Thirdly, of 500 people who attended the premiere in Los Angeles, only 50 people stayed, until the end. Most of them, became restless and asked for their money, back. One person try to start a lynch mob, when the theater refused! Even the projectionist fell asleep at certain points of the evening. While, it might sound like Warhol's film was not successful. Deep inside of Andy's crazy mind, he was having the time of his life. This was probably the goal, the whole time. He wanted to see the funny reactions! It was the funny punchline of a very unfunny joke. Warhol would later use this technique with his magnum opus 1965's eight-hour-long motion picture 'Empire'. Talk about really trolling the audience. That movie is hard to watch. Anyways, Warhol's uniquely counterintuitive approach to film, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences is something that future artists like Andy Kaufman would do, later in their own careers. Regardless of that, the movie does have some value for those, interested in watching it. One such example is the film has been used in sleep studies with those, involved with Polysomnography (PSG). It has been used for decades to diagnose and evaluate the severity of sleep-disorders like apnea, excessive snoring, problems staying awake and narcolepsy. Another cool thing about this film is seeing the rapid eye movement or REM at work. You can see all five stages here. Techniques of neurosurgery, chemical injection, electroencephalography, positron emission tomography, and reports of dreamers upon waking, have all been used to study this phase of sleep. Other than that, the movie is not much to look at. John Giorno is not quite sleeping beauty. His attractive levels is pretty damn low, so I doubt anybody with a sleeping fetish would get their kicks. Maybe if the film had its original performer, sex symbol, Brigitte Bardot to star in this. It might had been a little more successful, but I really doubt it. Even extreme perverts would probably get sick of this movie after an hour, watching it. In the end, "Sleep' is one film, not worth waking up to go see. I wouldn't mind, it staying in deep hibernation. Let this Andy Warhol's film stay dormant.