Ingrid Bergman as a nun: the people's favorite image at the Warhol museum
If you’re the Hollywood-blockbuster-at-the-mall kind of movie-goer, the film I saw Wednesday evening in Evanston, courtesy of Reeltime, may not float your boat. In fact, unless you’re the Netflix-it type, the German-made documentary Absolut Warhola will not be on your viewing radar at all, BUT, if you like offbeat films that make you think while you’re laughing, WATCH THIS ONE.
Absolut Warhola won the 2001 German Film Critics Prize for Best Documentary Film and the Audience Prize at the 2001 Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival.
Not impressed?
“Absolut Warhola will have its part in film history as most curious and thoughtful documentary on pop art.”–Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel not your go-to source of movie reviews?
Variety described it as “the film equivalent of a pleasant white wine with a kicker to it.”
Sounds summery, doesn’t it?
Absolut Warhola (German, 2001, 80 minutes, in Slovak and Ruthenian with English subtitles) ventures into the small town of Miková in Eastern Europe to visit the extended family of artist Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Museum, the only pop-art museum in Europe, located in nearby Medzilborce.
The citizens of Moková and Medzilborce have not prospered since the end of communism, and are happy enough to associate themselves with the wealthy American artist Andy Warhol. Their personal myths about Warhol’s life are varied and rather sweet, except for their raging homophobia.
Warhol evidently started sending stuff to Miková back in his shoe-illustration days. The pained sighs of the American audience listening to a Warhol relation’s stories of Warhol drawings being used to make toys for the children and then thrown out after a flood, were as interesting as the story itself. There’s nothing to twang our capitalist American hearts like unrealized investments…
The social and cultural incongruity of this monument to Warhol’s very urban, Western, ironically-capitalist art plunked down into a depressed rural corner of Eastern Europe is thought-provoking, funny and a little painful.
And then tonight I saw The Hangover.
–Peg
[...] for Ageless North Shore has taken us to the Evanston Library to see Warhola, a film about Andy Warhol’s ancestral home in Eastern Europe. To Glencoe to celebrate that [...]