There’s just ONE track staggered on the left & right with a slight delay.
Just play ONE TRACK – left or right – and the sound is clear.
There is a fair amount of footage of Warhol taking during the mid 1960s, his most productive and influential period as an artist, where he created the signature works for which he would become internationally known. Marie Menken did some great stop motion footage of Warhol making his “Flower” paintings, and independent filmmaker Bruce Torbet did a short film – “Andy Warhol – Superartist,” which used some sync sound to capture one day in the artist’s life, but this footage from the Canadian Broadcasting System for a 1965 documentary is the most authentic sync sound documentation of Warhol’s non-stop work methods during this era.
As the CBC’s site says of this footage, “spend a day with artist Andy Warhol at his studio and you might watch him make a screen print of an electric chair or observe him stretching a canvas onto a frame. You might even end up in front of his Bolex as the subject of one of his screen tests, as Village Voice art critic Andrew Sarris does in this item for CBC’s Show on Shows. In this 1965 interview with Warhol and his agent, Ivan Karp, Warhol shares his thoughts on TV (it would be better if it was short bits of soap opera between many commercials), the subjects of his art (Jackie Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor), and his experiments in film.”
In this raw footage, complete with clapper boards for later editing, you see Warhol and his assistant Gerard Malanga knocking out one silkscreen after another – here, a series of electric chair silkscreen prints – with almost complete indifference to Andrew Sarris, the famed film critic for the Village Voice, who lobs questions at Warhol which he answers with just a few enigmatic words, or passes off to art dealer Ivan Karp, who earnestly explains the “pop” aesthetic for Sarris, and for an implied television audience which at the time had no idea what “pop art” was.
As the footage continues, Warhol shoots a brief, 100′ screen test of Sarris, instructing him simply not to talk, with Malanga’s assistance in checking the exposure and focus – the only footage that I’ve seen in sync sound which documents an actual “screen test” – running roughly 2.47 minutes- shot with a Bolex with an electric motor, so the entire film is completed in one take. Warhol would soon expand this by the use of an Auricon camera, which could shoot 1200′ – or roughly 35 minutes – in one burst to create such films as Vinyl and My Hustler (both 1965).
The CBC has done something with the sound here which is rather annoying; adding a echo effect which makes the dialogue somewhat hard to understand, and distracts from the immediacy of the moment, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Also, it’s interesting to see how methodical and mechanical Warhol is as he creates one work of art after another, and how Malanga, normally a very loquacious person, says nothing as Andy directs the creation of both the screen test and the series of screen prints – it’s a Factory, all right, and this is just another typical work day. You also get a real sense of Warhol’s somewhat puckish sense of humor, in addition to his rather imperious control over what’s happening – he’s definitely a force to be reckoned with.