Lily Taylor forcefully as Valerie Solanas. When Valerie Solanas meets Andy Warhol in 1966,she pays – or, rather, doesn't pay – her rent by begging, prostitution and selling her S.C.U.M. Manifesto for the Society for Cutting Up Men, whose only member is Solanas herself. For Warhol, she writes the manuscript of a stage play called Up Your Ass, hoping tobe recognised by the hip artists' clique arouond Warhol. However, the script is too radical for the Warol Factory: pornographic gives way to lavatorial language and her ideas for the (partial) destruction of the ‘male race’ do not meet with the total acceptance. However, Solanas does succeed in entering this select group, appearing in one of Warhol's films (I, a Man) and finding a publisher, Maurice Girodias, who promises her a contract – and pulls a fast one on her. At the Factory, interest in her wanes, she is alone her fury, and is shunned as a person and as a woman by Warhol's sharp-tongued entourage. When she is humiliated as a guest on the Alan Burke Show, Solanas begins to succumb to paranoia. In the unshakeable belief that Warhol is behind all of her miseries, she goes to him and his artist friends, and pulls a .32 Baretta automatic...

Mary Harron's seven years' work on I Shot Andy Warhol has been worth it. It is fun to follow the plot of the film and the birth of the 30-year-old Andy Warhol culture. Although both could have been handled in a tighter way, this may be a paradoxical wish for a film which is partly about Warhol and his films. Although Warhol parties, with the bare-breasted pill-sorting Brigid Polk, and Gerard Malanga whipdancing to Velvet Underground are great fun, it does make one ask if this is a film about Valerie Solanas or the Factory. Basically, this film is too long and loses out on both counts. However, this is not particularly surprising, given director Mary Harron's occupation with Andy Warhol and the Factory during her time as a journalist, first in print, then for TV.

In all this recreation of the late sixties, Harron is unfortunately led astray by the comic aspect of past periods from a present point of view, as seen in such films as Forrest Gump, The Brady Bunch Movie and Mr. Holland's Opus. The unsympathetic characterisation of Solanas' contemporaries could be very revealing, but is only partly used to draw conclusions about the feminist. Even Solanas herself remains inaccessible to the audience as the protagonist for long periods. Right at the start of the film, the audience is regaled with the deed, an excerpt from her work, which uses crude language, and the demand for the elimination of men. This is done with no attempt to question or reveal the growing sense of revulsion in the audience. It is precisely the continuing revelation of Solanas' man-murdering thoughts which limits the radical nature of the feminist to violent tendencies, emphasised by the paramilitary exercises in the Motherfucker commune – which is, of course, made fun of.

What is missing is the depiction of structural violence against women. The only reference to this point is the hasty speech by a woman who is basically ‘mentally confused’, and which leaves no impression on the audience. Solanas' experiences of prostitution and incest with her father are so sketchily depicted, that they could feed the cliché of the lesbian-by-choice but not anymore a possible truth. Other experiences are completely non-existant. Near the end of the film, Solanas becomes paranoid. All too clear the film is lacking an attitude that you don't have a mind, if you cannot lose it over certain situations, as we can see in the Austrian film Der Kopf des Mohren by Paulus Manker, which deals with a different topic. And there is certainly no danger, or chance, of the audience going mad, as they probably will in Allie Light's documentary, Dialogues With Madwomen. One leaves the cinema not sharing Valerie Solanas' anger – a state of affairs unworthy of the author of the now classic feminist S.C.U.M. Manifesto, only partly put right by the forceful Lily Taylor.

This film has been waited for by Warhol fans for years and will please a broad intellectual mass. At least the German poster for the film (this background, just with a red strip) will lead people to the right screen. Lily Taylor's steady rise to the upper ranks of actresses should begin to show definite effects on this film. The films Nico Icon and more recently Basquiat about artists surrounding Warhol have re-awakened interest in him, not the opposite yet. And even if feminists may be disappointed with this film, they won't miss it.

ki, Milano – Berlin

Shown during the:
26th International Film Festival Rotterdam 1997