SUBJECTS

Portraits, American

Poor Little Rich Girl

featuring

Edie Sedgwick,

“Edie was incredible on camera—just the way she moved. . . . She was all energy—she didn’t know what to do with it when it came to living her life but it was wonderful to film. The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it’s just a movement inside their eye” (Andy Warhol, 1980). In March 1965, just a few months after he bought his first sound camera, Warhol began making a series of films of Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful young heiress whom he had recently met. The title Poor Little Rich Girl is a reference to the 1936 Shirley Temple movie of the same name, in which an eight-year-old girl runs away from her wealthy family to perform with a vaudeville troupe—a situation not unlike that of Edie herself, who had fled her tragic, wealthy family in California to join Warhol’s underground art world. . . . The Edie Sedgwick films are basically extended portraits; in fact, they can be regarded almost as documentaries—straightforward, unscripted filmings of Edie simply being “herself,” in scenes taken from her real life. 

Callie Angell
FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 16mm
  • 66 mins
Source
  • The Museum of Modern Art, New York
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Poor Little Rich Girl documents  

Andy Warhol (program note), Australian Cinematheque, 2007

Denial & desire in the cinema of Andy Warhol (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, Susan Oxtoby, 1998

Pop goes the Warhol collection (article), Buzz, E.L. (Daily News), 1996

Warhol: the films (article), Village Voice, J. Hoberman, 1994

Silver is the color of speed (article), San Francisco Bay Guardian, Chuck Stephens, 1994

Sundancing as fast as they can (article), Village Voice, Amy Taubin, 1994

Obscured object of desire (article), Reader (Chicago, Ill.), Fred Camper, 1994

Something secret: portraiture in Warhol's films (booklet), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Callie Angell, 1994

Warhol film & television (program note), American Center Paris, Yann Beauvais, 1994

The filmography of Andy Warhol (article), Jonas Mekas

Displaying 10 of 10 publicly available documents.


View all Poor Little Rich Girl documentation on CineFiles.

Preceded By

A Selection of Screen Tests

Andy Warhol, United States, 1964-66

The Screen Tests were “one of the most ambitious and long-lasting projects in Warhol’s career as a filmmaker and artist” (Callie Angell).

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 16mm
  • Silent
  • 15 mins
  • 16fps
source
  • The Museum of Modern Art, New York