Celebrity trumped art — once and for all? — on October 7, 1965, the night before the opening of an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The crush of people and television cameras was so dense that night that the museum’s director, Sam Green, decided the only way to save the art was to take it down.

The riotous crowd at the opening (in a recent interview, Mr. Green compared the scene to Nathanael West’s”The Day of the Locust”) was not there to see Warhol’s pictures, after all. It was there to see him, and Edie Sedgwick — the glamorous centerpiece of Warhol’s movies, the socialite he kept on his arm, the 22-year-old model who had just appeared as a “Youthquaker” in a Vogue magazine spread wearing her trademark black tights.

Sedgwick and Warhol — or “Edie and Andy,” as the pair was known — made 11 films together in 1965, a watershed year in the evolution of Warhol’s non-narrative cinema and an annus mirabilis in the history of superstardom. Sedgwick was a blue-blooded gamine, as blithe and frivolous as anything in her era. But on camera she had a tantalizing mystery that fascinated Warhol and helped make her famous — for a while, at least. After 1965, his wandering eye wandered elsewhere; she got addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in 1971, far removed from the Pop Art king’s court. But Warhol’s signature assured her, as it did so many things, a prominent place in America’s pop culture timeline. Sedgwick was the alpha celebutante, the original webcam girl, the first person-as-art-object of the multimedia era.

But did she make any decent movies? Audiences will have a chance to judge for themselves at “The Real Edie Sedgwick,” a 15-film series beginning Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image.

“What everybody says about them is that nothing goes on, but the opposite is true,” the museum’s head curator, David Schwartz, said of Warhol’s works for the screen, which dominate the museum’s film program. “But the films are so rich, because you focus on what you’re looking at.”

The act of looking is central to Warhol’s cinema, which dispenses with just about everything audiences expect from their movies, starting with the grand illusion that they’re not movies. Warhol’s films are largely uncut and unscripted; the camera would keep rolling (with Warhol sometimes not even present) until the film ran out, which is why his Edie movies last either 33 minutes — the length of a reel — or 66 minutes.

“Beauty #2” finds Sedgwick on a bed in lacy black underwear, the camera “trained on the bed like an artillery piece,” in the words of her friend George Plimpton. It is the record of a flibbertigibbet, a recognizable one, who is more interested in the camera than the lazy fondlings of the attractive young man (Gino Piserchio) lying beside her. “Kitchen,” in which Sedgwick applies eyeliner, discusses coffee, and lets a man seduce her during the course of two reels, offers something similar: a simple, casual, voyeuristic experience bare of narrative convention. Warhol described it as “illogical, without motivation or character.” It’s film in the nude.

The same could be said of “Empire,” Warhol’s notoriously inert eight-hour surveillance of the Empire State Building.

Mercifully, his portraits of Sedgwick, a woman who only came fully alive for the camera, revolve around a human element — and a strangely beguiling one at that. Sedgwick lacked the discipline to become a Hollywood actress, or even, according to 1960s vogue editor Diana Vreeland, a professional fashion model. Playing herself was her only proven talent, and it left few people unimpressed. “She suggested springtime and freshness,” Vreeland said.

Sedgwick also routinely spent two hours on her makeup, and it is this interplay of narcissism and naturalism that lends Warhol’s films so much of their mystique. “You can never decide whether she’s vapid or brilliant,” Mr. Schwartz said. “There was something absent about her, something about her odd personality which is both magnetic and oddly distant. It meshes perfectly with Warhol.”

The relationship was the subject of “Factory Girl,” George Hickenlooper’s recent biopic, which sparked the surge of renewed interest in Sedgwick. Last fall saw the publication of two new biographies, and the barometric fashion journal Women’s Wear Daily devoted an August spread to the “singular style” of Warhol’s “Pop Art princess.” Mr. Schwartz acknowledged he first seized on the idea for a Sedgwick film series when he learned Hollywood would be putting the ’60s “It Girl” back on the map.

Released last December, “Factory Girl” was mauled by reviewers for its superficiality. But according to Mr. Hickenlooper, that was precisely the point. “She was a very shallow person,” he said. “I think that’s what makes her a presence in the Warhol films: her shallowness and her great beauty.”

Of all the films being shown in the MMI series — which also includes a 24-minute film of a gallery opening Sedgwick attended and “Ciao! Manhattan,” John Palmer and David Weisman’s yarnball of Factory-era Sedgwick footage and scenes (in color) completed just weeks before her death — the only title that really grabs the eye is “Poor Little Rich Girl.” You can read all sorts of things into the fact that that film’s first reel, in which Sedgwick puts on her makeup and exercises her famous legs, is out of focus.

Compared with other public American tragedies, Sedgwick’s was surely trivial. But Warhol’s camera penetrated her coyness and sex appeal, and in its subtle way documented it all the same. These days, everyone from Paris Hilton on down seems to understand, and live for, the camera. You can lament that Warhol and Sedgwick did so much to bring us to this point. Or you can go watch their films, products of a time when the camera was still strange and provocative, and might even coax a bimbo to be that, too.

Through April 8 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-0077).