Award Presentation to Andy Warhol

When Andy Warhol refused to appear in public to accept the 1964 Film Culture magazine’s annual Independent Film award, Jonas Mekas made a mock documentary of Warhol and a group of his superstars at the Factory.

“The Independent Film Award for 1964 is presented to Andy Warhol. We see Andy among his leading stars, Baby Jane Holzer, Gerry Malanga, Ivy Nicholsen, and we see the the editor of Film Culture, Jonas Mekas, presenting the award: a basket of fruit—mushrooms, carrots and apples, bananas—which then, they all eat with great pleasure.”—Jonas Mekas

“I can recall seeing only one Warhol film which was wholly pastoral and unneurotic in feeling, which contained or provoked none of these or other disturbing implications; and that turned out not to be a Warhol film at all, as I thought at the time, but a kind of homage, by Jonas Mekas, to Warhol - really a work of Mekas' own sensibility though seemingly in the official Warhol style. When I saw Award Presentation I was hung for days on the kind of imagination revolutionary enough at once to conceive of a film as something so simple and to make that simplicity so pleasurable.”—James Stoller, Film Quarterly

Presented as the December 2023 edition of e-flux Film’s monthly series Staff Picks.

This edition of e-flux Staff Picks is co-presented by the Jonas Mekas Estate and Re:Voir.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.