Ciao! Manhattan

Ciao! Manhattan is an underground film starring former Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick. Edie was one of those troubled rich girls who died young because they only found solace in drugs and booze. Certainly an interesting individual. Of course, for me it is difficult to respect any "socialite" since the ones we've had the last two decades have given these people a bad name.

Ciao! Manhattan is a combination of two films: a black-and-white production made shortly after Sedgwick's exit from the Warhol Superstars from 1966-67 and color footage from 1970-71. Sedgwick plays herself, albeit with the name of Susan Superstar as she lives in a tent in the pool of her Mom's mansion, boozing and drugging herself to death while some drifter from Texas named Butch half-listens and half-dreams while she talks about her sordid life in New York.

I found the film to be 90 minutes of druggy dialogue. Ms. Sedgwick was clearly drugged up during the color segments. You needed subtitles to understand what she and Butch were saying. I also saw it as an overlong YouTube video where somebody is pleading for help. She's asking in vain for somebody to help her and the clowns who are supposed to listen to her cries for help are too busy screwing around.

Sadly for Edie, her entire 28 years were a total mess. I doubt even today you could save her. She was the Amy Winehouse of her day.

These people associated with Andy Warhol were quite an eclectic group and it is certainly worth watching any material you can find of them to see what the excesses of the 1960's did to them. I still wonder what happened to those drug addicts in the Roliing Stones' CS Blues but we already know what happened to Ms. Sedgwick.

The thing I really love about the D.V.D. revolution of the last few years is that some of the strangest and most obscure movies are now readily available. No longer do you have to spend hours searching through the racks in out of the way video stores or resort to fourth generation bootleg copies. 'Ciao Manhattan' is a case in point. I'd been curious about this movie ever since reading Jean Stein's brilliant Edie Sedgwick bio 'Edie' back in the 1980s, and now here it is! The 30th Anniversary edition, with excellent picture commentary and deleted footage. The only people who seem more excited about seeing it again than me are the directors (John Palmer and David Weisman) themselves going by the chatty and informative commentary track they have made with 'Ciao Manhattan' co-star Wesley Hayes. For those who don't know Edie was "The Face of 1965", a beautiful socialite turned model and Warhol "superstar". At one point in the 1960s quite possible the coolest girl in the world. Very shortly thereafter she was almost forgotten, and died aged 28 after a drug overdose. 'Ciao Manhattan' is made up of black and white footage shot in 1967 originally intended for a never finished movie that almost accidentally starred Edie, and later colour footage filmed in an attempt to salvage the project. In the final version Edie plays a character called Susan, a former model and underground film star who has retreated to her mother's home for "treatment". She's a mess - has permanent brain damage and a drinking problem. Hayes plays Butch a young Texan drifter who picks Susan up while she is hitchhiking half naked down the highway. He returns her home and Susan's mother (Isabel Jewell) hires him to babysit her troubled daughter. The movie cuts between "now" and then, colour and black and white, documentary footage and paranoid sci fi fantasy. It's quite a trip! Anybody interested in Andy Warhol or The Velvet Underground will want to see this very strange, but watchable mess. Neither Warhol or The Velvets actually appear mind you, but Warhol scenesters like Paul America, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin (Brigid Polk) and Viva do, as do Beat legend Allen Ginsberg (as himself, mostly naked) and 'Barbarella' director Roger Vadim (clothed, as Susan's doctor). If you watch the outtakes you also get to see Robert and Nena Thurman. Yes, Uma's folks. 'Ciao Manhattan' may not thrill everyone but for me it's essential viewing for anyone interested in 1960s pop culture, especially Warhol's Factory, which subsequently influenced almost every underground pop movement thereafter from punk on down.

Ciao! Manhattan is an avant-garde film that makes the films of Jean-Luc Godard seem conventional. That's not to attack Godard, mind you. I'm just comparing the two to express how far out Ciao! Manhattan is. The slight narrative concerns a young Texan hippie traveling the American countryside just because he likes to see things. One night, he sees something quite unexpected: a beautiful young woman with bare breasts hitchhiking. He picks her up (who wouldn't?) and finds that she has a couple of dog tags around her neck with her name, Susan, and address on them. He takes her home. Susan's mother thanks him and offers him a job taking care of her daughter. Susan was a young model in New York, a discovery of artist Andy Warhol. She lived a life of hard partying, and is now paying for it with a severe case of brain damage. Now Susan lives in a drained pool in her mother's back yard, and she spends endless hours drinking hard liquor and rattling off stories about the old days in New York.

At first, Ciao! Manhattan just seemed to me an excessively playful experimental film with a bunch of bizarre imagery and editing and stuff. I was laughing, it was fun to see the excesses of that sub-culture which I know so little about. But after a while, the film just started working, and really well. Susan is played by Edie Sedgwick, who really was a protege model of Andy Warhol. The film works a fine balance between reality and fiction. How much of Sedgwick are we seeing? Is any of it fictional. She died three months before the film was released, and, edited into the last moments of the film, there is a shot of a newspaper headline that announces the death. Whether Ciao! Manhattan was meant to be or not, it serves as a dirge, not only to Edie Sedgwick, but to the young generation of the time.

I don't know, maybe I loved this film because I grew to adulthood so far after the hippie generation, but I'll tell you one thing: I have seen a ton of the greatest films ever made. It's a rare experience to come upon one that is as unique as this one. Perhaps there were a thousand films like this at the time, but none are available except this. Well, I choose to praise this. 10/10.

This film is interesting only to anyone familiar with the saga of Edie Sedgwick. And it seems a bit ghoulish/voyeuristic to admit watching it for that reason. Although it's often claimed to be a biography of Edie, the film really is just a painful look at a person in the final stages of mental illness-drug addiction. She died soon after filming completed, which is no surprise.

The plot of Ciao is pretty garbled by the storyline involving the character Mr. Vedecchio. The director's commentary explains that Vedecchio was only added to the movie because during shooting the rest of the cast disappeared and there was nothing else to do but beef-up this role. In fact, the whole movie is a cut-and-paste of pre-meltdown Edie (black and white footage) and post-meltdown Edie (color), with Vedecchio and Paul America tossed into the mix. The color section also introduces Butch, the drifter from Texas, who does provide some much-needed comedy.

Although Ciao, Manhattan might not be particularly entertaining on its own, the DVD extras in the Anniversary package are wonderful, and to me made the disc worth purchasing. The directors' (and Butch/Wesley's!) commentary provides the story of how this movie "directed itself", and informs much about Edie and her state of mind during the last days of her life. There is quite a bit of extra footage from the Warhol-NYC days, and some terrific stills of Edie. A nice booklet is also included.

I've seen this video a couple of times, and I've seen parts of it many times and it always gets my attention. There's something oddly hip about it, even today. Maybe it's living in an empty swimming pool or just wasting the days sleeping that appeals to me, or maybe it's seeing a topless girl with a nice body seem entirely unglamorous, or is it just the kooky narration?... but there's a fresh insanity about this that makes it worth watching. I don't know, but anyway, I dig it .