Sleep (film)

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Sleep is a 1963 film by Andy Warhol which consists of long take footage of John Giorno sleeping for over five hours. The film was one of Warhol's first experiments with filmmaking, and was created as an "anti-film". Warhol would later extend this technique to his eight-hour-long film Empire.

Although planned as an eight-hour-long movie, Sleep was actually made by looping some of the footage. Sleep runs approximately six-and-a-half hours of equivalent shooting time. Warhol duplicated an additional ninety minutes from an equal ninety-minute section of the film to stretch it out to eight hours to approximate the scientifically accepted length of time for normal sleep.

The film was shot in the apartment of it's star, the poet John Giorno, with whom Warhol was having a sexual relationship at the time. On Memorial Day weekend of 1963, Giorno woke up to find Warhol watching him sleep and was asked by him if he'd like to be a movie star. It was made with a 16 mm Bolex but Warhol had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as he rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn't know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. He was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper's Bazaar before the movie was finished. In the end, 99% of the footage didn't get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long. The premiere of Sleep took place on January 17, 1964 at the Grammercy Arts Theater - a benefit screening for the Film-Makers' Cooperative. According to the New York Post, the screening was attended by only nine people - two of whom left during the first hour.

[edit] External links

• Sleep at the Internet Movie Database