Screen Tests

The Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits by Andy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. The Screen Tests, of which 472 survive, depict a wide range of figures, many of them part of the mid-1960s downtown New York cultural scene. Under Warhol's direction, subjects of the Screen Tests attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed, with the resulting movies projected in slow motion. The films represent a new kind of portraiture—a slowly moving, nearly still image of a person.^[1] Warhol's Screen Tests connect on one hand with the artist's other work in film, which emphasized stillness and duration (for example, Sleep (1964) and Empire (1965), and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.^{[2]: 12–13}