Hillary Kelly at The New Yorker:
Naturalness is the muse’s great gift. Like Helga Testorf, who merely had to stand still for Andrew Wyeth to want to transpose her spirit, Sedgwick had only to walk and talk for Warhol to track her every move on film. “Andy always picks people because they have an amazing sort of essential flame, and he brings it out for the purposes of his films,” the curator Henry Geldzahler once said. “He never takes anybody who has nothing and makes them into something. What he did was recognize that Edie was this amazing creature, and he was able to make her more Edie so that when he got it on camera it would be made available to everybody.” Warhol’s movies captured Sedgwick just being herself: putting on makeup, lying in bed, perching on a couch arm while looking about the room. She appeared in more than a dozen films, such as “Face,” a seventy-minute-long closeup, and “Afternoon,” a scripted “chamber opera” in which Sedgwick and friends gas around in her apartment, high on amphetamines. Sedgwick Wohl, who has spent decades watching her sister on film, observes her as if looking through a high-powered telescope. “What they saw in her was not talent but simply the way she was, transcribed onto the screen,” Sedgwick Wohl writes.
more here.