Andy Warhol's Eat is a film of artist Robert Indiana eating mushrooms and playing with a cat. Like his other films Sleep and Kiss, it exists somewhere between a documentary and a performance film. Whereas in Kiss the performers are absorbed in one another, and in Sleep the subject is unconscious, Eat's star can't help but be aware of the camera even as he tries to ignore its presence. Warhol's steady, detached cinematic gaze transforms Indiana's everyday activities into a self-conscious performance. Its tone is more meditative and less voyeuristic than those earlier films, but as a deliberate challenge to the audience's attention span, it prefigures the film that many consider to be the epitome of Warhol's film style: Empire.
Eat (1964)
Directed by Andy Warhol
Share on