Andy Warhol's 'Empire'

The full version of Andy Warhol's Empire. Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by." A week after the film was shot, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who was cinematographer for Empire) speculated in the Village Voice that Warhol's film would have a profound influence on avant-garde cinema. In 2004, Empire was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Empire was filmed at 24 frames per second, and is meant to be seen in slow motion at 16 frames per second, extending its 6+1⁄2-hour length to 8 hours and 5 minutes. The film consists of a stationary view of the Empire State Building lasting the entirety of the running time. The film begins with a blank white screen, a result of the camera being calibrated for nighttime filming. As the sun sets almost imperceptibly, the figure of the building emerges and its details become clearer. As the sun sets further, the building is enveloped in darkness. The building’s floodlights are turned on, illuminating its upper levels and spire. Lights in the windows of other structures go on and off. In the background, a beacon atop the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower flashes at intervals corresponding to every 15 minutes in real time (it flashes a single time every 15 minutes and at hour it flashes the time of day). Eventually, the floodlights go dark and the image in the remainder of the film is nearly total darkness. At three points in the film, the reflections of the crew, including Warhol, are seen in the windows of the Rockefeller Foundation office, where the work was filmed, as the office lights were not shut off before the crew started shooting after changing the film magazines. The initial idea for Empire came from John Palmer, a young filmmaker affiliated with Jonas Mekas. Palmer had been sleeping occasionally on the roof of Mekas's Film Maker's Cooperative, which had an impressive view of the tower, only a few blocks away. He told Mekas that he thought an image of the floodlit building would make a good Warhol film, and Mekas passed the idea to Warhol. Around the time Warhol considered the idea, he had completed (in late 1963) his first extended-length film, the 5-hour Sleep, which shows multiple views of a man sleeping; Empire was his second long film. In April 1964, the upper 30 floors of the Empire State Building were floodlighted for the first time in connection with the opening of the New York World's Fair in Queens. As the only floodlit skyscraper in New York City, the impact of the lighting was dramatic, with one person calling the tower's illuminated crown "a chandelier suspended in the sky". The floodlights were essential to Warhol's concept for the film, as there would be almost nothing to see without them. For a shooting venue, Warhol made arrangements to use an office belonging to the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building at 51st Street and 6th Avenue. Cinematography took place overnight on July 24 and 25, 1964. Present for filming were Mekas, Warhol, Palmer, Gerard Malanga, Marie Desert (Mekas' girlfriend), and Henry Romney (of the Rockefeller Foundation). From the window at the northeast corner of 51st Street and 6th Avenue, the camera was pointed southeast toward the Empire State Building at 34th Street and 5th Avenue, taking in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower with its blinking beacon at the corner of Madison Avenue and 24th Street, and the bulkier New York Life Insurance Company building at Madison Avenue and 26th Street. In contrast to Warhol's earlier films, which had been shot with a Bolex camera limited to three minutes of shooting time, Empire was filmed on an Auricon camera that allowed for takes of around 33 minutes. In the Rockefeller Foundation office, Mekas framed the shot for Warhol's approval, and filming commenced at 8:06 pm, about ten minutes before sunset. Mekas' article about the shooting printed in the Village Voice the next week described a lighthearted night of filmmaking, with Warhol discoursing on the Empire State Building as the most prominent site in New York, visited by celebrities and tourists alike, and various people in the room imploring Warhol to pan the camera. Shooting wrapped at 2:42 a.m. the next day, with 654 feet of film exposed. More on wikipedia.