Screening Report - "Sreentest: Helmut"

The Helmut Warhol Experience
by Daniel Robbins
Originally published 2 December 2009
on Cult Media Studies
for FIST 300 - Cult Cinema - Prof. Ernest Mathijs - UBC

Just after our class of over 50 university students had sung along with Julie Andrews and the children to the song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) we embarked on a piece of much less familiar cinematic territory: Andy Warhol’s “Screen Test: Helmut” from the same year. This particular audience, prepped by this particular situation (Cult Cinema class, 9:30AM, having just turned a childhood article into ‘Camp’) led to a unique experience of this fairly obscure film. I would be willing to guess that virtually no one in the class had seen “Helmut” before that day. On the heels of singing and laughing along with “Do-Re-Mi” we began to watch “Helmut” with no preconceived notions of how to receive this film. As the film began to roll there were some muffled snickers as we all watched in anxious anticipation for something to happen. Not more than a minute into it people began to yell things out, to the class and to Helmut. I believe the first was actually Professor Ernest Mathijs. His and other comments were along the lines of, “do you think he’ll blink?” or, “I think he likes us”. As Helmut sat there on screen motion and emotionless, we became very vocal and emotional. I looked around in awe at the normally subdued class yelling and laughing on the edge of their seats. I did not have too many clever quips to add to the excitement, but my laughter was sure heard. By the end of the five minute film nearly the whole class was laughing and jeering at the screen. What is a seemingly serious screen test, of a clearly very serious German screen actor, becomes something completely new in this context. As Andrew Ross states, “it is the critic and not the producer who takes full credit for discerning the camp value of an object or text”(Ross 56). We are entirely uncertain of Warhol’s intentions in his production of this short film, we are do not even care. Viewed from a phenomenological perspective, in our eyes the film has no purpose or meaning in itself; it only acquires these through our perception of it (Mathijs 16). Through our particular experience, we turn Warhol’s film into a cult object, regardless of his intentions, or whether it was ever considered cult by anyone before us. The reason we received this in such a way had a lot to do with our setting. As a class of university students (mostly film studies major/minors) we are already on somewhat of the same page. This was taken a step further with our collective singing along with the clip from The Sound of Music. At that point we had become our own specific niche culture. We shared a similar state of mind, and in that way, as a group changed the usual perception of both of these films, especially “Helmut”.


Works Cited

Matijs, Ernest, and Xavier Mendik. The Cult Film Reader. Open University Press. 2008.

Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp”. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik eds.The Cult Film Reader. Open University Press. 2008. 53-66.