The Double Role Of The Camera In Outer And Inner Space

The Double Role of the Camera in Outer and Inner Space

Carolina Wonder

"Edie was incredible on camera-just the way she movedÐ'...She was all energy-she didn't know what to do when it came to living her life, but it was wonderful to film. The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it is just a movement inside their eye."

Andy Warhol, 1980

David James has suggested that Warhol's films can be divided into three stages: investigations into the process of being photographed and of becoming an object (Sleep (1963), Kiss (1963), Blow Job (1964), the screen-tests, Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)), the construction and fragmentation of artificial selves by means of roles appropriated from Hollywood (Lonesome Cowboys (1967-68), Blue Movie (1968)), and the representation of exhibitionism and spectatorship in feature film that is adjacent to Hollywood (The Chelsea Girls (1966), Flesh (1968-69), and Trash (1969)).

The trouble with James's classification is that Outer and Inner Space falls within neither category. One the one hand, the background video shot of Edie Sedgwick in profile is a sort of pseudo-photograph, which keeps her gigantic severed head enclosed within the confines of the TV screen. In this shot, her head is tilted upward while she rambles on in indecipherable audio and her face is almost completely devoid of expression. At moments Warhol pauses the frame thus flattening her image further until it becomes a video-photograph that functions as a sort of wallpaper for the Edie in front of it. While this image is representative of James's first category of Warhol films, Edie Sedgwick's performance in front of the TV set is troublesome in that instead of reducing Edie to an object, the camera reveals her subjectivity as well, and she becomes an active agent of the film, along with Warhol and the cultural factors that contribute to anyone's self-construction of image.

Outer and Inner Space recalls Warhol's earlier film work in that he shoots his subject from a fixed angle for an extended length of time. He used this concept to make several feature-length films and over five-hundred Screen Tests (1963-1965), which consisted of nothing more than a 4 minute shot of a person from the waist up, standing in the center of the frame, staring straight into the camera lens. The subject's only job was to stand perfectly still and not flinch or even blink. The obvious tension that aroused when these people were asked to behave like a photograph of themselves make these portraits more performance than film.

We cannot help but think of Edie Sedgwick in Outer and Inner Space as a performer as well. Warhol had the idea to make the film when he was loaned some rather expensive video equipment from the Norelco Company in the summer of 1965, when video had just come onto the market. Warhol was particularly fascinated by the novel convenience of video playback, which allowed him to place his subject within the same frame of his or her own image. He made Outer and Inner Space in August of 1965 by first, filming two videos of Edie Sedgwick, and then immediately making two films of her with the video being played back on a television set behind her. The newness of video playback must have enthralled Edie as well. What a surreal experience to encounter your double on the TV screen and then have to entertain the film camera while hearing your surrogate self whisper into your ear!

Edie's "other" is filmed in such a way that she appears less real than the Edie sitting before the camera. Warhol begins one of the projections with a close-up of Sedgwick's face looking into the camera, with her larger head in profile just off to the left. The effect gives the appearance that there are two Edies and it is her face in profile which seems to be in foreground. About five minutes into the film, Warhol pans out to reveal that the setting is identical to the projection next to it- Edie's self in profile is actually a pre-recorded video being played on a television set. The isolated head loses its meaning because we cannot imagine its connection to the rest of her body and it gains new meaning through having been transposed from space into another dimension. She appears as a kind of Sybil who speaks from beyond our world of space and time. Her surreal presentation as a floating head give us the impression that she is speaking from otherworldly knowledge, which we cannot understand because of the film's poor sound quality and Warhol's manipulation of the audio levels.

The video within the film recalls Warhol's earlier minimalist films like Sleep of 1963 and Empire of 1964. In Sleep, the film's star has the effortless task of doing precisely what the title suggests. The six-hour long film consists of various shots of Warhol's friend, the poet John Giorno, sleeping. But it is the eight-hour long Empire of 1964, whose actor has the easiest task of all. The subject of this film is the Empire State Building, doing exactly what it always does, namely nothing.

With these films Warhol created the conceptual film, analogous to "conceptual art" whose importance lies in the idea more than in the film itself. One does not need to see these films (even Warhol himself did not watch all his film in their entirety) to grasp their meaning. With these films Warhol pointed out that moving pictures can show stillness as well as motion. Warhol's breakthrough was not really a discovery; he simply brought to our awareness an aspect about film that was too obvious to notice, that "in a moving picture it is the film itself that moves and not, necessarily its object, which may remain still."

However in Outer and Inner Space we cannot say that we are seeing an image of Edie Sedgwick at all. In both the video and the film we are seeing the flesh and blood Edie Sedgwick. Even the stoic profile video recording of Edie reminds us of this when she sneezes into two-thirds of the film. Up to this moment the video recording of her head had barely moved, her eyes had remained looking upwards as if in a trance while she spoke. When this video-photograph of Edie sneezes we are startled. And perhaps we are startled at ourselves as well since somewhere in our conscious we were aware all along that the video Edie is just as real as the film Edie sitting in front of her. Warhol actually recorded the video shots of her right just minutes before he made the film recordings. So how is it that we are inclined to think of one as an image and one as the live Edie? By turning the live Edie sideways and in an extra-large close-up shot, Warhol fools us into thinking of