Trash

Classics from La Semaine de la critique 
1970/color/110 min. | Scr/dir: Paul Morrissey; w/ Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn, Geri Miller.

Paul Morrissey became and still remains famous for a trilogy of films—Flesh, Trash and Heat—made and released under the banner "Andy Warhol Presents" that feature the iconic Joe Dallesandro as the passive center of a swirling, loquacious society of junkies, prostitutes, and transvestites. Morrissey became a member of Warhol's circle in the mid-sixties when the Factory was already infamous as the production center for Warhol's static camera real time films, and the clubhouse of the Superstars, Warhol's colorful and uninhibited entourage. Gradually introducing editing and narrative into the Warhol films, Morrissey fundamentally changed their aesthetic: rather than observant documents, the films became a medium for the performers and their real and constructed personas. Taking the idea "that drug people are trash," to its illogical extreme, Morrissey created a seminal work of cinema, a topical black comedy that is as relevant today as it was in the sixties. Like a Beckett play, the action is situated in an unheated basement apartment furnished with trash scrounged from the street, where Holly, determined to salvage her dignity, vainly tries to arouse her drug addicted boyfriend Joe while scheming to get back on welfare and "be respectable" again. Infused with transvestite Holly Woodlawn's irrepressible charm and deadpan non sequiturs, Trash became Morrissey's richest work, "a brilliant, funny, tragic, moving film." (Rolling Stone)