Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was an American artist, filmmaker, and central figure of the Pop art movement whose practice spanned painting, photography, publishing, and performance. From his New York studio the Factory he turned to filmmaking in 1963 and produced a vast and influential body of avant-garde cinema, including the eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building Empire (1964), the five-hour Sleep (1963), the Vinyl adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1965), and his Screen Tests portrait series (1964–1966). His first commercial film success was The Chelsea Girls (1966), co-directed with Paul Morrissey — a split-screen, three-and-a-half-hour collage of vignettes featuring his Factory superstars, shot largely inside the Chelsea Hotel. Chelsea Girls is now widely considered a landmark of American underground cinema and was added to the National Film Registry in 2024.