The Chelsea Girls is perhaps Warhol's most incisive and technically ambitious film project. Spanning a double screen and three hours, the film takes place in the (in)famous Chelsea Hotel in New York. There we meet an eclectic entourage of residents and visitors-artists, actors, junkies, gays and straights, a priest, a mother; the fragile and the hardened, enacting a series of non-related non-events (conversing, sitting around, confronting, crying, staring, giggling, haranguing, turning on, having sex). Warhol assembled these vignettes (from twelve separate reels) to fabricate a complexly structured underground vision. As the actors (Factory "superstars" Ondine, Nico, International Velvet, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, et al.) drift from one room to the next, one screen to the other, one tends to forget that they were cast in predetermined roles; their naturalness suggests that they are playing themselves. Actions and attitudes are articulated by a hypnotic visual scheme of saturated color washes, a prowling camera and a dual soundtrack which alternates with the action. What Warhol achieved is a panorama of pain and terror, humor and desperation, what one critic described as "Narcissus in Hades." Warhol said, "I feel I'm very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television." The Chelsea Girls reflects in microcosm the human condition in America's Great Society: a spirit harboring alienation, boredom, fear, anger, and the dissolution of the sensual.--Laura Thielen