When Andy Warhol made his first film in 1963, he aimed his 16 mm Bolex camera squarely at then-boyfriend John Giorno. But Giorno, a poet and performance artist, doesn’t play a character or even speak in the black-and-white production aptly titled Sleep. Arguably Warhol’s most famous film, it’s 5 hours and 21 minutes of Giorno’s upper body and pillow-framed face. The avant-garde creation has been called an anti-film, but the strange appeal of a sleeping Giorno has endured. It propelled the compulsively prolific Warhol into a new medium as he went on to create another 300 films and thousands of other fragments stored on videotapes.
Sleep by Andy Warhol
When Andy Warhol made his first film in 1963, he aimed his 16 mm Bolex camera squarely at then-boyfriend John Giorno. But Giorno, a poet and performance artist, doesn’t play
