Vinyl (1965)

Item: Vinyl
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Vinyl (1965)

Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange in 1962, and within three years it had already attracted the attention of Andy Warhol, who produced this loose screen adaptation well before Stanley Kubrick's now-iconic 1971 version entered the cultural conversation. Warhol's Vinyl arrived in 1965, shot at his famous New York studio known as the Factory, and distributed under the Andy Warhol Films banner. It sits within the broader movement of American underground cinema that was gaining traction in mid-decade New York, a scene deliberately positioned against the polished studio product of the era and equally against the earnest art-house imports arriving from Europe (if you want a sense of what more disciplined European art cinema looked like at the same moment, my review of Persona might offer a useful contrast, or there is Winter Light from a couple of years earlier). The film runs to around 70 minutes, and its classified genres, science fiction and comedy, may raise an eyebrow given how little of either quality announces itself on screen.

Warhol's directorial approach at this point in his career was, to put it charitably, anti-conventional. He had been making films since roughly 1963, works such as Sleep and Empire that tested the patience and the goodwill of any audience willing to sit with them, and Vinyl follows in that tradition. The production was characteristically low-budget and improvisational, confined to a single room and shot in black and white with a fixed or near-fixed camera. The cast was drawn from the Factory's regular orbit of performers and personalities rather than trained actors, a deliberate aesthetic and ideological choice on Warhol's part. Gerard Malanga, Ondine, Tosh Carillo, and J.D. McDermott all appear, alongside a briefly present Edie Sedgwick, who was at the time one of the most recognisable faces associated with Warhol's circle. None of them were employed here for conventional dramatic ability, and the film makes no pretence that they were. For viewers accustomed to science fiction that builds worlds and pushes ideas outward, something like Mad Max: Fury Road or even the more anarchic energy of Hardcore Henry will give a sense of how differently the genre can handle questions of violence and social control when it actually commits to the telling.

Whether Vinyl constitutes a genuine engagement with Burgess's source material, or simply borrows its surface premise as a loose justification for 70 minutes of Factory atmosphere, is a question the film itself seems entirely uninterested in answering. Warhol was, at his best, a genuinely provocative cultural force, but provocation and purposefulness are not always the same thing, and the gap between them is where this particular film tends to live.

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.

I find it difficult to make a case for Vinyl on the grounds that it rewards patience, because my honest experience of it was that patience ran out long before the runtime did. There is a version of this kind of filmmaking that earns its difficulty, that uses stillness or repetition to create something genuinely unsettling or meditative. This is not that version. The Burgess novel it nominally draws from is a tight, angry, stylistically inventive piece of work, and the distance between what the source material offers and what ends up on screen here is considerable. If Warhol's intention was to strip away meaning to expose something underneath, the experiment simply does not land. I would rather spend an evening revisiting almost anything else from this decade than sit through it again. Worth knowing about, as a line in the history of avant-garde film. Not worth the hour.

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

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