Rediscovered Warhol films from 1960s to be screened at MoMA

On Feb. 2 at 6:30 p.m., the Museum of Modern Art will screen "Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed Films From the 1960s," revealing more than an hour of footage shot by Andy Warhol and his collaborators in the 1960s that was not developed until spring 2024. The material was found in 2015 by Katie Trainor of MoMA and Greg Pierce, then of the Andy Warhol Museum, in a storage facility in Pennsylvania where MoMA keeps Warhol’s films.

A box faintly marked "raw stock" contained 45 rolls of 16 mm film, with some labels such as "Jerry & Girl" and "3-12-66 Ann Arbor Car Ride." Since Warhol’s death in 1987, almost all his footage has passed into the Warhol Museum’s keeping. Trainor entrusted the undeveloped rolls to Colorlab in spring 2024, where owner Thomas Aschenbach processed 86 100-foot rolls.

More than half proved unexposed or overexposed, but 38 rolls yielded imagery described as remarkably intact after six decades. The processing did not produce unknown masterpieces, but preserved a trove of otherwise unseen Warhol footage. The recovered material includes eight new films from Warhol’s Screen Tests series, fresh portraits of Dennis Hopper and Jane Holzer, a Screen Test of Naomi Levine and other figures not yet identified, and lighthearted early footage of a couple in Central Park from the summer of 1963.

Other reels capture a Factory party from March 8, 1966; the Jan. 4, 1964 opening of Frank Stella’s show at Leo Castelli’s gallery; and the Velvet Underground’s R.V.

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