Most people associate the word "portrait" with a framed painting or photograph of someone standing or sitting in front of a background.
Pop artist Andy Warhol, on the other hand, developed a different kind of portrait in his "13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests" shown at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art Thursday night.
"Warhol was interested in the tension between the image of the person and the actual person," said Scott Bishop-Wagoner, curator of education at JCSM.
He produced about 500 screen tests on 100-foot silent film reels between 1964 and 1966, she said.
He then arranged them in sets of 13 depending on subject matter and slowed the film speed.
"Andy Warhol was exploring the repetition of the image and how it, in a sense, loses its identity," Bishop-Wagoner said, "and his screen tests were the opposite -- they helped to show the person's true identity."
Warhol invited friends, famous people and strangers to sit in front of the camera for each of the reels in hopes to reveal their true personalities, Bishop-Wagoner said.
"He believed their real personalities would emerge after being in front of the camera for this period of time," she said.
A testament to Warhol's theory, his tests reveal personality traits and mannerisms that could be lost in still photographs.
Consider Ann Buchanan, Californian Beat poet: sitting incredibly still, the young brunette with large, brown eyes looks without blinking into the camera.
Just before the four-minute film runs out, a tear rolls down her right cheek, then her left.
Notice Lou Reed, a radio host and musician: with short, wavy hair and sunglasses, the young man drinks a Coca Cola out of a glass bottle throughout the entire length of film.
Watch Jane Hoolzer, an art collector and socialite: while the camera zooms in closely on her face, the blonde with light eyes brushes her teeth and laughs intermittently until the film reel stops rolling.
Because the footage has no sound, musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips decided to create unique pieces of music - inspired by the character of the individual on Warhol's films - to accompany each portrait.
"His work was set to music to contextualize how he used the screen tests for himself," Bishop-Wagoner said. "I think the music had a big say in which 13 videos were picked and shown."
The musicians worked from moods, but also tried to compose based on the individuals' expressions and coordinated certain words with certain emotions shown by the people being taped, Bishop-Wagoner said.
Julianna Bailey, a recent graduate in nutrition and food science, appreciates Warhol's work and enjoyed the mixture of art and music during this presentation.
"I like the Dean and Britta score that they put with everything," Bailey said. "I thought it went well."
Bailey attends museum events only when she finds them particularly interesting, she said.
Adam Gullatte, a senior in anthropology, recognized the event as a one-time opportunity.
"I don't feel obligated to attend museum events," he said, "but putting on an Andy Warhol movie isn't something that happens every Thursday at five."
Gullatte also enjoyed Warhol's screen tests.
"I liked how they expressed people's personalities - the same people I've seen in [Warhol's] movies and books I've read," he said. "You could tell so much just through looking at the faces."
Attendance of the event was better than expected, Bishop-Wagoner said.
"About 35 people came," she said. "It is encouraging in the middle of the hot summer to have that many people come out to the museum to watch a film."
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