Full disclosure, I have not watched all of Andy Warhol's "Empire." I have seen clips of the film, and have experienced a 64x speed version of its entirety, but have never sat through it from beginning to end in real time. To be fair, I don't think anyone has - probably not even Andy Warhol.
The definitive modern artist, Warhol created "Empire" in 1964. The whole film is a single sustained black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building, filmed from the Time-Life Building a few blocks up in Manhattan. With an eight-hour and five minute runtime, the movie starts in the early evening and shows the sky darken as the Empire State Building's floodlights ignite. The camera continues rolling (all the while in subtly slow motion) until around 3am the next day, when the floodlights turn off and only sparse glimmers remain on the dark screen.
Obviously, a movie like this - I guess one could call it a documentary, if not curated CCTV footage - was never meant to be watched in full. As a piece of art, it is more like a painting or a photograph than a conventional film, meant for periodical observation rather than chronological engagement. As one testament to this, "Empire" is often projected on museum walls rather than in theaters.
Nevertheless, it is still a piece of film. Created with a movie camera, it can be nothing else. But rather than create it for the sake of entertainment or aesthetic, Warhol seemingly made "Empire" to inspire debate and conversation. Discussing the film inevitably raises questions about art's purpose and cinema's language.
To me, "Empire" is primarily a defiant example of Andre Bazin's early claims about movies and their indexical relationship with reality. While other film theorists embraced cinema having a language of its own, Bazin (along with Siegfried Kracauer) opposed invasive artistry in the then-novel medium, and preferred the camera as a tool for capturing the world that is.
"Empire" thus exposes the pitfalls of such an approach, as Warhol reflects reality in cinema's purist form with no editing, dialogue, story, or subjects (excluding the distant people and vehicles in the cityscape). The movie demonstrates by contrast how even films that aim for raw realism still incorporate artistry in their functional elements. If a film banished all artistic intervention, the remains would look very "Empire"-like.
Still, some claim that there is greater depth in "Empire," and I cannot disagree with them. When one stares at the building's floodlights against the dark sky for long enough, the image becomes a Rorschach test of sorts, inviting profound psychological questions. The narrative-less nature of "Empire" allows the viewers' minds to wander, creating stories and themes prompted only on some subconscious level.
Then there are the questions of postmodernity and industrialization. Warhol made the film just months after the Empire State Building installed its floodlights for the 1964 World's Fair. Is Warhol celebrating the technological sublime, or belittling it? Are the lights going off at the end meant to be foreboding? In the 1960s, is he showing us this towering edifice to say something about the future? The past? The death of narrative meaning in a post-structuralist society?
Or is he saying nothing at all, and in his silence, letting our interpretations run rampant?
Rating a movie like this is near-impossible. All the elements of cinema that usually warrant criticism are taken out of the equation. It seems effective at what is does, but what it does is up for endless debate. Meanwhile, if we bought tickets to a movie and got "Empire," we'd definitely want your money back. And if we were forced to watch the whole thing, we'd probably die of boredom near the fifteen-minute mark.
Let's just give it a 6/10 and understand that it cannot be judged alongside most (if any) other movies.
The definitive modern artist, Warhol created "Empire" in 1964. The whole film is a single sustained black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building, filmed from the Time-Life Building a few blocks up in Manhattan. With an eight-hour and five minute runtime, the movie starts in the early evening and shows the sky darken as the Empire State Building's floodlights ignite. The camera continues rolling (all the while in subtly slow motion) until around 3am the next day, when the floodlights turn off and only sparse glimmers remain on the dark screen.
Obviously, a movie like this - I guess one could call it a documentary, if not curated CCTV footage - was never meant to be watched in full. As a piece of art, it is more like a painting or a photograph than a conventional film, meant for periodical observation rather than chronological engagement. As one testament to this, "Empire" is often projected on museum walls rather than in theaters.
Nevertheless, it is still a piece of film. Created with a movie camera, it can be nothing else. But rather than create it for the sake of entertainment or aesthetic, Warhol seemingly made "Empire" to inspire debate and conversation. Discussing the film inevitably raises questions about art's purpose and cinema's language.
To me, "Empire" is primarily a defiant example of Andre Bazin's early claims about movies and their indexical relationship with reality. While other film theorists embraced cinema having a language of its own, Bazin (along with Siegfried Kracauer) opposed invasive artistry in the then-novel medium, and preferred the camera as a tool for capturing the world that is.
"Empire" thus exposes the pitfalls of such an approach, as Warhol reflects reality in cinema's purist form with no editing, dialogue, story, or subjects (excluding the distant people and vehicles in the cityscape). The movie demonstrates by contrast how even films that aim for raw realism still incorporate artistry in their functional elements. If a film banished all artistic intervention, the remains would look very "Empire"-like.
Still, some claim that there is greater depth in "Empire," and I cannot disagree with them. When one stares at the building's floodlights against the dark sky for long enough, the image becomes a Rorschach test of sorts, inviting profound psychological questions. The narrative-less nature of "Empire" allows the viewers' minds to wander, creating stories and themes prompted only on some subconscious level.
Then there are the questions of postmodernity and industrialization. Warhol made the film just months after the Empire State Building installed its floodlights for the 1964 World's Fair. Is Warhol celebrating the technological sublime, or belittling it? Are the lights going off at the end meant to be foreboding? In the 1960s, is he showing us this towering edifice to say something about the future? The past? The death of narrative meaning in a post-structuralist society?
Or is he saying nothing at all, and in his silence, letting our interpretations run rampant?
Rating a movie like this is near-impossible. All the elements of cinema that usually warrant criticism are taken out of the equation. It seems effective at what is does, but what it does is up for endless debate. Meanwhile, if we bought tickets to a movie and got "Empire," we'd definitely want your money back. And if we were forced to watch the whole thing, we'd probably die of boredom near the fifteen-minute mark.
Let's just give it a 6/10 and understand that it cannot be judged alongside most (if any) other movies.