You’ve got three minutes

J. Hoberman

• Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Vol. I by Callie Angell
  Abrams, 319 pp, £35.00, April 2006, ISBN 0 8109 5539 3

For two years, beginning in January 1964 and ending in late 1966, hundreds of individuals trooped through Andy Warhol’s midtown Manhattan studio (the vast, silver-painted loft known as the Factory), there to sit before a 16mm Bolex camera and have their portraits made on film.

The portraits, each of which used a single 100-foot roll of film, required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch. At first, these static motion pictures were known around the Factory as ‘stillies’. Eventually, they would be called Screen Tests. In the first instalment of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s cinema, Callie Angell, a film historian, estimates that there were 472 Screen Tests, some 60 per cent of which have been preserved.