Dean Wareham talks Warhol

• Photo by Julienne Schaer

Dean Wareham admits that being asked to score 13 of Pop Art icon Andy Warhol’s screen tests was intimidating. In 2008, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust commissioned Wareham and his wife Britta Phillips, aka indie pop duo Dean and Britta, to put music to 13 of Warhol’s “stillies” featuring Factory regulars such as Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, and Edie Sedgwick, for the 2008 Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. The result is The 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a guitar-and-keyboard soundtrack of original works created specifically for the short films, save a few older Dean & Britta songs, a cover of Reed’s “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore” for the Velvet Underground frontman and a Bob Dylan cover (“I’ll Keep it With Mine”) for Nico. The project led to the first DVD release of Warhol’s works. Dean and Britta come to Atlanta to perform The 13 Most Beautiful… at Symphony Hall as part of the High’s Culture Shock event series. The exhibit Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters remains on view at the High through April 29.

Would you explain Warhol’s screen test films?
Warhol made 472 of these films between 1964 and 1966. They are short, silent, black-and-white portraits. Before he was doing this he was doing photo booth portraits, which he called “stillies,” so this kind of grew out of that – it was the next step when he bought a Bolex and decided that he was moving into making film. He didn’t really know how to edit film I guess; he didn’t have to edit film. He’d just load a reel of film, which is about three minutes in length, and he would sit someone against a white background or a black background and just let the film roll and tell them to stare straight into the camera and do as little as possible. Then he would play these films back at a slower speed, at a silent film speed instead of the sound film speed, so they’re all kind of stretched out. So, they play back and they were just over four minutes each and that’s what kind of gives them a slightly spooky quality. If you slow down someone’s face you can kind of see things flicker across them that you really wouldn’t otherwise notice. The first part of our assignment was to pick 13 of these films.

Continue reading Debbie Michaud’s interview with Wareham on Culture Surfing ...