Warhol was a genius, so we're told

Andy Warhol was a genius. That's what the talking heads tell us over and over in a four-hour film about the archetypal pop artist to be shown tonight and tomorrow night on PBS. The expert witnesses assembled by director Ric Burns are eloquent talkers, but they rhapsodize so effusively and at such length about Warhol's transcendent brilliance that you want to shout at the TV, ``All right, I get it. Now please get down to earth and just tell me the story."

Meanwhile, Burns hardly ever lets his subject speak for himself. Warhol appears in many film clips in which he often is visibly talking, but except for a few brief moments the sound of those clips remains off. Warhol was one of those people, like Bob Dylan, who toyed with the media like a cat with a mouse. He maintained an affectless expression, spoke in a breathy monotone that some thought he got from Jackie Kennedy, and refused to reflect on the deeper meanings of his art or his life. Yet, as with Dylan, it is fascinating to hear him say the baffling things he did say and it is frustrating that Burns does not let you hear more of him.

Nevertheless, the film does tell a fascinating tale. With its voice-over narration fervently intoned by artist and semi-pop star Laurie Anderson, it gives a clear and often gripping account of the remarkable trajectory of Warhol's life, and for that it will be well worth watching even for those who think they already know a lot about the artist.

The first installment follows his rise from an impoverished, sickly childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1930s to his glittering success as a New York commercial artist in the ' 50s to his sensational emergence as a deadpan painter of Campbell's soup cans, movie stars, car crashes , and electric chairs in the early ' 60s. Turning dark and disturbing, the second half focuses on the scene at the famous Factory, Warhol's studio in the mid- ' 60s where he made films like ``Sleep," which shows a man sleeping for five hours, and ``Empire," an eight - hour study of the Empire State Building. Warhol thrived on the openness of the Factory, where movie and rock stars, drug addicts, petty criminals , and drag queens mixed freely.

But the Factory also attracted dangerously unstable people, like Valerie Solanas, who, in 1968, realizing that Warhol would never keep his promise to turn a screenplay she wrote into a movie, shot and almost killed him.

After the shooting Warhol went corporate. That's when he started making millions producing commissioned portraits for rich people and launched Interview magazine. Many critics think his art went downhill then, but Burns's film argues persuasively, if not convincingly, that Warhol was working as hard and as imaginatively as ever until the day in 1987 that he went into the hospital for a routine gall bladder operation from which, due to negligent post-operative care, he never recovered. He was 58.

Burns's account does not change the generally known outlines of Warhol's biography, but it does provide a huge amount of unfamiliar and often poignant information. We learn about his terrible childhood bout with St. Vitus' dance, a neurological disorder that causes uncontrollable leg and arm movements, and that his famously indifferent attitude might be traceable to a painfully unrequited love for a young man with whom he traveled around the world in the 1950s. We hear about his mother coming to visit and staying for 20 years. And we follow his struggle to escape commercial art and launch a fine art career; we learn in illuminating detail about his technical progress -- from blotted line drawing to silk screening to film and his breakthrough shift in the ' 60s from loosely expressive painting to a coolly mechanical style.

For all that, Warhol remains an enigma. We don't really know what makes him tick other than a powerful drive to be famous, but he does not seem like a regular human being. So it comes as a surprise when, near the end of Burns's documentary, we see an old film -- with the sound left on for once -- in which Warhol welcomes Susan Sontag to his studio for one of the hundreds of three-minute film portraits that he made: He is so friendly and polite in such an ordinary way that it is truly shocking.

Warhol's influence on contemporary art and culture remains immense. Conventional wisdom about fame, celebrity, the media , and mass consumerism owes him an incalculable debt. At the end of the film, when art dealer Irving Blum declares that Picasso owns the first half of the 20th century and Warhol the second, you almost believe it.

But therein lies the film's big problem. You don't have to dislike Warhol to feel suffocated by the elevated rhetoric that, however insightful, mainly affirms current academic consensus. There are intelligent, well-informed people who don't think Warhol's cultural impact was all to the good. Many are tired of the Warholian irony and the obs ession with kitsch that is ubiquitous in art and in the broader culture. A dissenting voice would have helped liven up the conversation in this otherwise richly illuminating study of a great American artist.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.