Hello Dear Frameworkers,
Does anybody have any hints where I could find Andy Warhol's 1966 film: Mrs. Warhol [The George Hamilton Story]? I would appreciate it very much.
A very good collegue of mine - Zsolt K. Horváth, a brilliant social historian and critic - wrote an interesting little paragraph on Warhol's mum. I have copied a rough translation of his writing below, alongside the attachment of the frame he talks about, and the literature he refers to.
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"JÚLIA ZAVACZKY, married name Júlia Varchola (Mikó, 1891 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1972), who loved drawing angels and cats very much, and her son, Andy Warhol (1928–1987), already born in Pittsburgh, around 1947. Not incidentally, the latter also loved drawing angels and cats. Nevertheless, in my view the punctum of the image is the “little apron” and the “house dress,” which Júlia may well have brought with her from around Eperjes in 1921, when she followed her husband, Andrej Varchola (1889–1942), to the United States.
Although in the photograph both appear silent, the question arises: in what language did they actually speak to one another? An article published in Esquire drew Andy’s artist friends’ attention to the creative possibilities of his mother Julia Varchola’s manner of speech. Andy Warhol, after all, cast his mother in the film Mrs. Warhol (originally The George Hamilton Story, 1966). Susan Pile, the film’s sound technician, wrote the following about this to one of her friends: “I was at Andy’s house this week (a truly rare privilege). Andy was shooting The George Hamilton Story, in which his mother played the lead role -this being her film acting debut. (…) Read this month’s issue of Esquire, which features an interview with Mrs. Warhola, who speaks Czechoslovak (!) with Andy and can communicate with others only in a confused English. A very sweet elderly lady.” In recent years, however, studies by Elaine Rusinko have pointed out that the Rusyn family quite obviously did not speak Czechoslovak (sic!), and that their English was not confused but rather a kind of mixed, emigrant language, in which English words were fitted with Slavic prepositions.
When Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants arrived in America,” writes Elaine Rusinko, “lexical borrowings from English became integrated into the language, especially for concepts that did not exist in the old country. Expressions such as rent platit [pay rent], lem pyat minute ride [only a five-minute ride], and James dostal cara [James got a car] are convenient mixed expressions that also appear in Julia’s correspondence and are understood by bilingual speakers. English verbs were transformed by the addition of Rusyn morphological endings: mam klinuvati apartment [I have to clean the apartment], vi ne feelujete dobri [you don’t feel well]. As a result, this distinctive mixed Rusyn language became a source of shame and inferiority for immigrants, just as it had been in the homeland, where the prestige language was first Hungarian and later Slovak.” Otherwise, in the work of Imre Oravecz as well, the car in an American context is káre, and home is ókontri.
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Thanks and best,
Mihály
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