Warhol a prodigious and outrageous filmmaker

warhol's screen test 47
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Warhol worked across a wide range of media, says Wikipedia – painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture.

In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films[45], plus some 500 short black and white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors.[46]

One of his most famous films, Sleep, monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35-minute film Blow Job, is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this.

Another, 1964's Empire, consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. The film Eat consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.

Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by LaMonte Young called Trio for Strings and subsequently created his famous series of static films including Kiss, Eat, and Sleep (for which Young initially was commissioned to provide music). Uwe Husslein cites filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, and who claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance.[47]

His most popular and critically successful film was 1966's Chelsea Girls. The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s.

Other important films include Bike Boy, My Hustler, and Lonesome Cowboys, a raunchy pseudo-western.

These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art.[48][49]

Blue Movie, a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time, was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter.

After his June 3, 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking.

His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat.

All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro, who was more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.