Empire

Empire (1965)

Filmed by Jonas Mekas from the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building, “Empire” explores the passage of time without the use of characters or a traditional narrative. The film, that consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building, was made from standard 1,200-foot rolls of 16mm film with a more than eight-hour runtime.

Date of release
1965-03-06
TMDB
4.4 / 10 (46)
Runtime
7h 59m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Andy Warhol

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: New York City

Empire is a 1965 American silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion black-and-white footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The silent 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."

Production

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.

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".

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).

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.

Empire was shot on ASA 400 Tri-X stock, which was developed as a negative rather than a reversal, and push-processed to ASA 1000 to compensate for the dark conditions of filming. The push-processing gives the film a graininess that calls attention to the medium of the film stock itself during projection in a manner that Douglas Crimp compared to the way that ink in Warhol's silkscreen paintings is present as both blobs of ink and as part of the i…

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