Andy Warhol'S Blow Job

"A whole book on one short film may seem excessive, but when the film is Andy Warhol's Blow Job-a pivotal document of the productive tensions between pop and art, pornography and avant-garde, gay and straight, visible and invisible 'sex'-one book hardly seems enough. Roy Grundmann has produced the definitive analysis from every possible perspective of this most fascinating of self-reflexive films. The amazing thing is how vital and compelling each of these perspectives seems."-Linda Williams, Director of Film Studies, U.C. Berkeley, and author of Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson "Roy Grundmann has extended Andy Warhol's diabolical plot to make respectable 1960s film critics say a naughty expression for an illegal sex act, making an academic book title out of it forty years later! He has also done the near impossible, written a book on a single-take film, more talked about than seen for most of those forty years, that is a masterful synthesis of queer history, cultural theory, and film studies. Grundmann has deftly demonstrated the centrality of the minimalist masterpiece that is Blow Job-and of its sly author-to postwar Western avant-gardes and to the sexual and racial cultures they inhabit."-Thomas Waugh, Professor of Film Studies and Director, Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University "Finally, the longest reaction shot in film history has found its ideal analyst. Roy Grundmann has written a thoughtful, funny, accessible, yet deeply theorized book that situates Warhol's most (in)famous film in all its polymorphous contexts. This book shows just how rich 'close reading' can be, yet it offers a window on the entire underground of a Warholian century."-Caroline A. Jones teaches contemporary art and theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has written about Warhol in her Machine in the Studio, among other places "Andy Warhol's Blow Job is a tour de force, a virtuosic elaboration of a myriad of resonances, implications, and subtexts to what appears to be one of the simplest films possible. The control of the film scholarship is impeccable and there's hardly a missed beat in the writing. Grundmann's book is a terrific addition to film studies, Warhol studies and queer studies. It wears its learning lightly and with grace."-David James, Critical Studies, School of Cinema, USC "Grundmann's strength lies in his theoretical improvisation on a theme, his wandering off into Hollywood film, hypochondria, Mailer, Kinsey, and whatever else his keen analytical eye alights on."-Cineaste "...the book wields its greatest strength from its reader-based cultural studies methodology."-Film International "[T]he book is...impressive vital, even moving."-Film and History "Roy Grundmann, a self-conscious enthusiast of the film, has made a sometimes compelling, always scholarly and I think finally unarguable case for Blow Job's importance and interest... this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Warhol, and especially the Warhol films."-GENRE