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Vinyl (1965)

★ — Vinyl (1965)

Vinyl is Andy Warhol's loose adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, arriving a full seven years before Stanley Kubrick's far more celebrated version. Shot in a single afternoon at Warhol's Factory studio in New York, it was made in 1965 during the period when Warhol was producing films at a remarkable, almost industrial rate, churning out work on 16mm with minimal preparation and zero conventional budget. Gerard Malanga, a poet and frequent Factory collaborator, takes the central role, while Edie Sedgwick, then at the height of her brief fame as Warhol's most prominent "superstar", sits to one side of the frame throughout, largely uninvolved in the action.

Vinyl (1965) is Andy Warhol at his most punishingly inert. A black-and-white, single-room endurance test loosely "adapting" A Clockwork Orange with all the narrative coherence of a security camera feed. Shot in Warhol's Factory with his usual troupe of non-actors (including a briefly glimpsed Edie Sedgwick), the film unfolds in real time as men in leather loiter, fondle each other listlessly, and occasionally slap one another while a record spins endlessly in the background. There is no plot. No character development. No discernible point beyond documenting boredom as an aesthetic principle. Warhol's avant-garde provocations have their place in art history, but Vinyl mistakes minimalism for meaning and tedium for transcendence. An hour (or 67 minutes, to be precise) trapped in this airless space feels like an eternity, not because it's challenging or thought-provoking, but because it's simply empty. The performances are affectless to the point of catatonia, the cinematography static to the point of comatose, and any subtext about violence, sexuality, or dystopia remains buried so deep it might as well not exist. Even by Warhol's deliberately anti-cinematic standards, this feels less like a statement and more like a failed experiment left undeveloped. Avant-garde without purpose. A historical footnote worth reading about, but not worth watching. Unless your idea of entertainment is watching paint dry in black and white while people vaguely mime discomfort.

Rating: ★ | Year: 1965 | Watched: 2026-04-09

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