Film review: Face Addict

Another week, another snippet of Warhol cine-marginalia. This is a movie memoir by Edo Bertoglio, the Swiss-born photographer and film-maker who was a satellite of the Andy Warhol scene in New York in the 1970s and 80s, and took photos for his Interview magazine as well as album covers. (His best known work now may be Blondie's 1978 album, Parallel Lines.) Bertoglio loved portraiture, and how this art intersected with the growing cult of celebrity, and this is why he describes himself as a "face addict". This is, however - and as Bertoglio appears to concede - evasive and disingenuous. He was addicted to something far more banal: hard drugs, and this took a terrible toll on him personally, and on so many of the people he knew. Why should we care about any of these people? Well, it's not immediately clear. What of their work survives now, which of the paintings or photos or underground movies come to life, right now, in 2008? Bertoglio doesn't offer any answers, and his musings about that forgotten "Downtown" scene are melancholy, but self-indulgent.