Intimate Class Relations

The first Warhol movie I saw was Sleep. It was June 1964 at the Cinema Theater on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the birthplace of Midnight Movies. Sleep didn’t begin at midnight, it began around 6:45 pm. It’s a long movie; as I recall, it ended around 12:30 am. There were about 500 people in the theatre when the film began; there were about ten left when the movie ended. I was one of them, although I didn’t watch the whole movie: after four hours or so, I slipped out for a snack at the coffee shop around the corner.

This text first appeared in the Viennale catalogue in 2005. Integral text is available in the print edition of KINO!, as well as in the 8th edition of the online film magazine Rouge.