Sleep

Note: During the screening of this 5-1/2 hour film, patrons may leave the theater and return as they wish. Admission to the galleries is free with your Sleep ticket stub from 2:30 to 5 p.m. Andy Warhol made only a few films which can be regarded as conceptual works-films that can be instantaneously and successfully conveyed as ideas without actually being seen. Both Sleep, which was initially announced as "an eight-hour film of a man sleeping," and Empire (shown earlier in our series) function, at least in part, as works of art at this purely conceptual level. To actually watch Sleep is to discover a work whose physical presence-meditative, beautiful, yet complexly structured, achronological, and endlessly repetitious-is significantly at odds with the simplicity of its conception. The outrage with which audiences responded to Sleep seems to have been related to the discrepancy between its promised subject and its actual content, which is a fragmented, rather abstract assemblage.-Callie Angell During the first two nights that Sleep was shown at the Gramercy Arts Theater in 1964, a transistor radio tuned to a pop music station was played at low volume during the screening. In this spirit, our screening will feature radio accompaniment.

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