Vinyl (1965)

Item: Vinyl
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Vinyl (1965)

There's a version of this where I tell you that Vinyl is a demanding, uncompromising work that rewards patience and intellectual rigour. There's a version where I invoke the spirit of the avant-garde, talk about Warhol dismantling the grammar of cinema, and make it sound like sitting through 67 minutes of men in leather listlessly pawing at each other in a single room is some kind of enlightening experience. I'm not going to do that. Because it isn't.

This is Andy Warhol at his most punishingly inert, and I say that as someone who can find value in slow, difficult, deliberately anti-narrative filmmaking. I admired the stillness of Persona. I've sat with Bergman's silences and felt them pressing against me like something real. Warhol's Vinyl is not that. This is a black-and-white, single-room endurance test that loosely "adapts" A Clockwork Orange, and I put "adapts" in quotes because that word implies a coherent engagement with source material that simply doesn't exist here. What you get instead is something closer to a security camera feed: static, affectless, and utterly indifferent to whether you're watching.

Shot at the Factory with Warhol's usual troupe of non-actors, the film unfolds in real time as men in leather loiter, fondle each other with apparent boredom, and occasionally slap one another while a record spins endlessly in the background. Edie Sedgwick appears briefly, perched at the edge of the frame. That's more or less the sum of it. There's no plot to speak of, no character development, and no discernible point beyond documenting boredom as an aesthetic principle. Any subtext about violence, sexuality, or social conditioning remains buried so deep beneath the surface that it might as well not exist.

Now look, I understand what Warhol was doing, broadly speaking. The Factory aesthetic was about stripping cinema of its artifice, exposing the mechanics, rejecting Hollywood's slick conventions. And when that impulse produces something like Daisies, a film from the same era that's equally chaotic but crackling with anarchic energy and genuine wit, I'm completely on board. The difference is that Věra Chytilová's film has something behind its eyes. Vinyl has nothing. It mistakes minimalism for meaning and tedium for transcendence, and those are very different things.

The performances are affectless to the point of catatonia. The cinematography is static to the point of comatose. And when the film's one hour and seven minutes are finally, mercifully up, you don't feel challenged or provoked or intellectually stirred. You feel like you've been sitting in a waiting room where nothing is ever called. Not a pleasant waiting room, either. One with bad lighting and a record that won't stop skipping.

There's a fair argument that Vinyl matters as a historical artefact, as a document of a particular moment in American underground culture, of the Factory crowd, of the mid-sixties avant-garde pushing hard against every idea of what film was supposed to be. Fine. I'll grant all of that. It belongs in the footnotes of film history, and those footnotes are worth reading. But reading about it and watching it are two very different propositions, and I'd strongly recommend the former over the latter.

Even by Warhol's deliberately anti-cinematic standards, this feels less like a statement and more like a failed experiment left undeveloped. A one-star curiosity. Watch a documentary about the Factory instead, and spare yourself the 67 minutes.

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

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