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{{other uses|Screen test (disambiguation)}}
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[[File: Warhol_Sedgwick_Screen_Test.jpg|thumb|upright=1.75|alt=Black-and-white image of a woman with short light hair shown from the neck up against a light background. Her head fills the center of the image from top to bottom and casts a shadow on the background to her right.|Still from a Screen Test of [[Edie Sedgwick]], 1964]]

The '''''Screen Tests''''' are a series of [[Short film|short]], [[Silent film|silent]], [[Black-and-white|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.<ref name=moma1>{{cite web|title=Andy Warhol: Screen Tests|url=https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/142|publisher=[[Museum of Modern Art]]}}</ref> 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 film)|Sleep]]'' (1964) and ''[[Empire (1965 film)|Empire]]'' (1965), and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.<ref name="Angell">{{cite book|last=Angell|first=Callie|title=Andy Warhol Screen Tests|date=2006|publisher=Harry N. Abrams|location=New York|isbn=9780810955394}}</ref>{{rp|12–13}}

==History and production==
[[File: NYPD_most_wanted_andy_warhol.jpg|thumb|left|upright=.75|alt=Black-and-white image of a page from a booklet of wanted criminals. There are front and side view mug shots of a man at the top of the page, and text describing crimes he committed below.|Page from NYC Police Department booklet, ''The Thirteen Most Wanted'', 1962]]

The ''Screen Tests'' were initially inspired by a 1962 New York City Police Department booklet entitled ''The Thirteen Most Wanted'', which showed mug shots of wanted criminals.<ref name=Angell />{{rp|13}} The same booklet was the source of the images in Warhol's short-lived mural entitled ''[[Thirteen Most Wanted Men]]'' at the [[1964 New York World's Fair]], together with a series of paintings using the same images. A second source for the ''Screen Tests'' was Warhol's interest in [[Photo booth|photo-booth]] portraits, which he had begun to use in 1963 for paintings such as ''[[Ethel Scull 36 Times]]''.<ref name=Angell />{{rp|13}} Like the ''Screen Tests'', photo-booth portraits document the appearance of a sitter across successive moments in time.

In January, 1964, around the time he was working with the police booklet images to design the World's Fair mural, Warhol shot a series of short moving-image portraits of young men, the film canisters of which were labeled—in a riff on the booklet title—''13 Most Beautiful''. The first ''Screen Tests'' were made at the house of [[Winthrop Kellogg Edey]], one of the subjects in ''13 Most Beautiful''.<ref name=Angell />{{rp|13; 70}} Each film is as long as the 100-foot length of film in the magazines for Warhol's [[Bolex]] movie camera (about three minutes), and shows a single subject presented in the style of the brochure's mug shots: from the neck up, with a featureless background, facing forward, with the portrait filling the frame from top to bottom. The subjects were generally directed by Warhol to hold perfectly still and not blink for the three-minute duration of the filming.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Foster|first=Hal|author-link=Hal Foster (art critic)|title=Test Subjects|journal=[[October (journal)|October]]|date=Spring 2010|volume=132|pages=38–39|doi=10.1162/octo.2010.132.1.30 |jstor=20721275|s2cid=57570860 }}</ref>

After making these early shorts, Warhol began to incorporate the shooting of ''Screen Tests'' into the routine of his studio, [[The Factory]], alongside the making of new paintings and other aspects of his enterprise. The filming of ''Screen Tests'' was rarely prearranged. There was an area set up for shooting, but the decision to make one was spontaneous, generally involving people who happened to be visiting The Factory.<ref name=Angell />{{rp|15}} Nearly all of the ''Screen Tests'' use the nearly motionless, front-facing style of the first films. Warhol varied the shooting conditions for individual films, changing the number of lights or their angles to alter the pattern of shadow on the subjects' faces and the backdrops behind them or using different lens aperture settings. Some subjects sat for multiple ''Screen Tests'' on a single day. By the end of 1966, two years after his first ''Screen Tests'', Warhol had produced at least 500 of them, of which 472 survive.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Dargis|first=Manohla|author-link=Manohla Dargis|title=Unblinking Eye, Visual Diary: Warhol's Films|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/movies/21darg.html |access-date=14 November 2014|newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|date=October 21, 2007}}</ref>

The short films were not called ''Screen Tests'' until the end of 1965; until that time, Warhol labeled them "film portraits" or "stillies" (a [[portmanteau]] of "still-movies").<ref name=Angell />{{rp|15}} They were not screen tests in the general sense of the film industry, in that they were conceived as independent works of art and not a way of choosing people to act in a production.<ref>{{cite web|title=''Screen Tests''|url=https://www.warhol.org/lessons/screen-tests/|website=The Andy Warhol Museum}}</ref> Warhol made two longer films in 1965, [[Andy Warhol filmography|''Screen Test #1'' and ''Screen Test #2'']], that more closely resemble traditional screen tests.

==Reception and legacy==
Film critic Philip Dodd listed the ''Screen Tests'' among his favorite films in 2002 when he voted for the ''[[Sight and Sound]]'' poll.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20120803102529/http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Philip&surname=Dodd BFI, Sight & Sound]</ref>

Author [[Kate Zambreno]] wrote about the screen tests in a 2019 collection of essays titled ''Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing''.<ref>[https://kzambreno.com/screen-tests ''Screen Tests'' by Kate Zambreno], kzambreno.com</ref>

==Selected ''Screen Test'' subjects==
Many of the 472 surviving ''Screen Tests'' depict people who remain well known for their accomplishments or for their association with Warhol's circle. Following is a selection of people who appeared in ''Screen Tests'' who are also the subject of Wikipedia articles, chosen to give an overview of the range of Warhol's subjects. The definitive compilation of the ''Screen Tests'' and their subjects is ''Andy Warhol Screen Tests'' by Callie Angell (2006), the first volume of the ''[[Catalogue raisonné|catalogue raisoneė]]'' of Warhol's films.
{{columns-list|colwidth=20em|
* [[Paul America]]
* [[Eric Andersen]]
* [[John Ashbery]]
* [[Benedetta Barzini]]
* [[Marisa Berenson]]
* [[DeVeren Bookwalter]]
* [[Joe Brainard]]
* [[John Cale]]
* [[Lucinda Childs]]
* [[Salvador Dalí]]
* [[Niki de Saint Phalle]]
* [[Diane di Prima]]
* [[Donovan]]
* [[Marcel Duchamp]]
* [[Bob Dylan]]
* [[Cass Elliot]]
* [[Danny Fields]]
* [[Charles Henri Ford]]
* [[Henry Geldzahler]]
* [[Allen Ginsberg]]
* [[Piero Heliczer]]
* [[Freddy Herko]]
* [[Dennis Hopper]]
* [[Peter Hujar]]
* [[Kenneth King (dancer)|Kenneth King]]
* [[Kenneth Jay Lane]]
* [[Donyale Luna]]
* [[Gerard Malanga]]
* [[Jonas Mekas]]
* [[Mario Montez]]
* [[Paul Morrissey]]
* [[Sterling Morrison]]
* [[Nico]]
* [[Ondine (actor)|Ondine]]
* [[Yoko Ono]]
* [[Peter Orlovsky]]
* [[Lou Reed]]
* [[Rene Ricard]]
* [[James Rosenquist]]
* [[Barbara Rubin]]
* [[Francesco Scavullo]]
* [[Edie Sedgwick]]
* [[Harry Everett Smith|Harry Smith]]
* [[Jack Smith (film director)|Jack Smith]]
* [[Holly Solomon]]
* [[Susan Sontag]]
* [[Amy Taubin]]
* [[Paul Thek]]
* [[Maureen Tucker]]
* [[Chuck Wein]]
* [[John Wieners]]
* [[Marian Zazeela]]
}}

== See also ==
* [[Andy Warhol filmography]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

== External links ==
* [https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/Andy_Warhol_Screen_Tests-inventory.pdf "Andy Warhol ''Screen Tests'', reels 1–28], [[Museum of Modern Art]]

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[[Category:Films directed by Andy Warhol]]
[[Category:American silent short films]]
[[Category:American black-and-white films]]
[[Category:Avant-garde and experimental film series]]
[[Category:1960s avant-garde and experimental films]]
[[Category:1960s American films]]
[[Category:American avant-garde and experimental short films]]