Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Humanoids

The story goes that Creation of the Humanoids (1962) was Warhol's favorite film.  If Warhol himself had teamed up with Alain Robbe-Grillet to film a SF screenplay by a bright, nerdish 18-year-old, they might still not have dreamed up something quite so fierce or so stolid, so marble-slab-cool (but filled with bright colors).  The beauties of this film come from both being ambitious but also not at all trying to court any real standards of modernism (i.e., modernist critical taste) in nevertheless producing a quasi-modernist end product.

It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being."  (Peter Nellhaus)

"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation.  And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.'  As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it."  (Chris Fujiwara)

6 comments:

Lauren Bliss said...

Thanks for this post! I'm officially adding this film to my thesis :D

ZC said...

Fantastic!

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