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HORSE1965. PRODUCER: Andy Warhol. SCENARIO: Ronald Tavel. LIGHTING & PHONOGRAPH: Billy Name. SOUND: Buddy Wirtschafter. BOOM: Betty Stahl. TECHNICAL ASSISTANT: Gerard Malanga. HORSE TRAINER: Leonard Brook. CAST: Larry Latreille (The Kid), Gregory Battcock (The Sheriff), Daniel Cassidy (Tex), Tosh Carillo (Mex), Mighty Byrd (The Horse). FORMAT: 16mm. TIME: 105 minutes. ORIGINAL RELEASE: November 22, 1965. “You could do more things watching my movies than other kinds of movies: you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there. It’s not the ideal movie, it’s just my kind of movie.” –Andy Warhol 1965 marked a surge in Andy Warhol’s filmic output. Shot and shown in that weighty year of Vietnam escalation, space walks, and civil riots, HORSE was just one of over 25 films that Warhol’s film factory churned out. The film, a mischievously queer and cruel “Western,” consists of three long takes that capture four young men dressed in cowboy outfits acting out vaguely Western scenarios. With its static framing and rudimentary narrative, the film falls somewhere between Warhol’s early period of silent, fixed-frame Minimalist expressions (EAT, SLEEP, and EMPIRE) and his later period of more discernible narrative forms (BIKE BOY, NUDE RESTAURANT, and Warhol’s other Western LONESOME COWBOYS). While Warhol is typically considered the author of these films, these works were an extension of the group-manufacture process of his paintings. Warhol’s friends and collaborators often had an equal—and sometimes more prominent—role in the crafting of these movie experiments. Certainly, critic Jonas Mekas and filmmaker Jack Smith served as important early conspirators and guides. Often times, Warhol didn’t even direct actors or the camera, assigning the traditional role of directing to his assistant Chuck Wein. Later, after Warhol was shot by his—almost—own Pale Rider, he handed over filmmaking duties to Paul Morrissey. As for HORSE and many of the films of ’65, the vital creative force was poet Ronald Tavel. “I’m interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions.” –Andy Warhol Enlisted by Warhol to fashion “not plot, but incident,” Tavel devised a series of lurid, semi-scripted situations. For HORSE, Warhol wanted to put a real steed in a film, so he instructed Tavel to write a Western. In order to generate ideas, Tavel interviewed the film’s featured players: art critic Gregory Battcock (the Sheriff), French-Canadian runaway Larry Latreille (the Kid), poet Dan Cassidy (Tex), and a bona fide sadist, Tosh Carillo (Mex), who, by day, worked as a florist. Tavel’s efforts resulted in a scenario that parodied Western movie clichés, brought the genre’s latent homoeroticism to the surface, and mixed in a few esoteric references. (“To think I could have killed you a thousand times” is a line swiped from the Maria Montez espionage picture TANGIER.) In order to allow some room for the unpredictable, the performers were not aware of the script until the actual filming took place when idiot cards, held by Tavel and Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga, provided them with their lines. The scenarist also incorporated his own interest in sadism. “What I really wanted to say,” recalled Tavel, “was how easily would a group of people under pressure be moved to sadistic acts: to genuinely inhuman acts toward each other and perhaps the horse.” With the aid of a little amyl nitrite and offscreen prompting, the performers didn’t take very long to reach such brutal extremes. Shooting took place on April 3, 1965 in the Factory, Warhol’s workspace occupying a former hat factory on East 47th Street. To everyone’s surprise, the Dawn Animal Agency delivered not a pony, but a large stallion, which was brought up in the Factory’s freight elevator along with its trainer. The understandably nervous horse was placed in front of the elevator entrance and next to the studio’s pay phone. With this backdrop, the film presented not only the planned action but also the chance events of guests entering the Factory and the phone ringing. Despite the schematic set, Warhol worried that this Western setting looked too realistic. So he positioned Tavel’s brother and photographer Norman Glick behind the horse as mute onlookers and instructed the boom operator to lower her mic into the frame. Shot in three long takes, the film captures the Western tableau vivant on two reels, with the third reel providing a view onto a post-shoot calm, in which the equine star is visited by various Factory fixtures, including Edie Sedgwick, who here makes one of her earliest screen appearances in a Warhol movie. However, in the final film, the third reel was placed in the middle, disrupting the anarchic action with a near soporific lull. “I like American films best, I think they’re so great, they’re so clear, they’re so true, their surfaces are great. I like what they have to say: they really don’t have much to say, so that’s why they’re so good. I feel the less something has to say the more perfect it is.” –Andy Warhol Situated within the Crank’s quarter-long program of Westerns, HORSE brings to the fore what has been dormant in the genre, namely homoeroticism and a cowboy’s love for his horse. Revising traditional notions of Old West masculinity, Tavel argued that cowboys had to be either celibate, asexual, homosexual, or onanistic. The writer asked, “Why else would they spend their whole life on the prairie? They were also in love with their horses, obviously. Horses as sex objects.” Yet the film’s display of sexuality is far from barefaced. In fact, much of the film’s impish humor derives from using strip poker and an almost indecent guzzling of milk as codes for these characters’ queer desire. And what about the American myths that the Western so effectively plays out? We might make the claim that HORSE comically actualizes the American frontier’s closure: this Western tale is relegated to the urbanized confines of Warhol’s studio. For Warhol and company then, the new frontier is not geographic, but rather, sexual and cinematic. In HORSE, the traditional homestead mutates into the homo-stead and the continuity cutting of the plan américain—perfect for balancing the prairie and the cowpoke from the boots up—transforms into the relentless gaze of the immobile plan-séquence. Or we might invoke Chon Noriega’s assertion that Warhol “is nothing less than the frontier thesis of modern art, a process and not a place within the national imagination.” In this light, Warhol and his collaborators were important revisers to the Western genre and our own myths. Program notes by Daniel Steinhart SOURCESBerg, Gretchen. “Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol.” Cahiers du Cinema in English 10 (May 1967): 38-43. James, David E. “The Warhol Screenplays: An Interview with Ronald Tavel.” Persistence of Vision 11 (1995): 45-64. ---. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Koch, Stephen. Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and his Films. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973. Mekas, Jonas. “Notes After Reseeing the Movies of Andy Warhol.” Reprinted in Andy Warhol (exhibition catalogue). Ed. John Coplans. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1970. Noriega, Chon. “Warhol’s Western: Queering the Frontier Myth.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 29.1 (Spring 2004). Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Patrick S. Andy Warhol’s Art and Films. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Tavel, Ronald. Horse scenario. 1965.
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