Synopsis
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 and half hour runtime to 8 hours and 5 minutes. [6] 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). [6] 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. [7]
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. [8] [9] 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, [6] the impact of the lighting was dramatic, with one person calling the tower's illuminated crown "a chandelier suspended in the sky". [10] The floodlights were essential to Warhol's concept for the film, as there would be almost nothing to see without them. [6]
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. [3] 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). [8] 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. [11] 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. [3] Shooting wrapped at 2:42 a.m. the next day, with 654 feet of film exposed. [8]
Empire was shot on ASA 400 Tri-X stock, push-processed to ASA 1000 to compensate for the dark conditions of filming. [7] 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 image. [12] Each reel contains a segment of film that was exposed to incidental light during processing, which may be evidence that the final work is unedited. [13] The complete film consists of ten reels, each lasting approximately 48 minutes when projected in slow motion at 16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol. [14]
After the film had been developed and printed, Warhol did not have funds to pay the processor, and Palmer arranged with his mother to make the payment. In recognition of his role in conceiving, assisting with and paying for the film, Warhol listed Palmer as co-director. [9]
Release
Empire premiered on March 6, 1965, at the City Hall Cinema in Manhattan, then the site of Mekas' Film-Makers' Cinematheque. [15] Reporting on the premiere in his Village Voice column, Mekas claimed that after the film had been running for ten minutes, 30 or 40 people surrounded him and another staff member demanding their money back, "threatening to solve the question of the new vision and the new cinema by breaking chairs on our heads". [16] According to Robert Fulford of the Toronto Star , 80 people paid $2 per seat, and when they discovered it was "eight hours of film of the Empire State Building at night with no action except for the occasional light turning on or off," half demanded their money back, and one man called the police. When the cops came, they were disappointed because they suspected it was a "dirty" film. The angry individuals were refunded, but about ten people stayed for the entire film. "They talked to each other, drank beer, slept, and agreed it was a fine movie." [17]
Gregory Battcock, a critic who was part of Warhol's circle and appears in several of his films, [18] connected the film with other works by Warhol in terms of its focus on a subject that the viewer already generally knows. He argued this left space to emphasize other issues, particularly the physical medium of film, and the artistic use of long duration as a way of concentrating attention on these qualities. Battcock also observed that Empire had quickly become a classic of the avant-garde and promised to have great if unpredictable influence on the development of film. [19]
In 1966, Warhol and his colleagues began producing events featuring rock band the Velvet Underground; these went by several names, ultimately becoming best known as the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable." In addition to the Velvet Underground, the Exploding Plastic Inevitables featured simultaneous mixes of strobe lights, dancers, colored slides and film projections. Advertisements for the events held in the spring of 1966 in New York's East Village mention Empire among other Warhol films to be screened. [20]
Legacy
By 1972, Warhol withdrew most of his film catalog, including Empire, from circulation. Film historian Callie Angell observed that the inaccessibility of the film until some years after Warhol's death in 1987, along with the assumption that a film such as Empire must be unwatchable, gave Empire a life mainly as an idea about a film that expressed Warhol's outrageousness as an artist, with some accounts lengthening it to 10 or 24 hours. [21] In 1988, the film began to be screened again as part of the cataloging and restoration of Warhol's films undertaken by several institutions. [22] In 1992, the original negative was rediscovered and used to make new prints of the film. [7]
Mechanical projectors capable of showing the film at 16 frames per second have become rarer since the 1970s, with most current machines capable of a minimum speed of 18 frames per second; when projected at this rate, the film is about seven hours and 10 minutes long. [13] Empire is distributed by the Museum of Modern Art's Circulating Film and Video Library. [23]
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Jonas Mekas was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide. Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers' Cooperative, and the journal Film Culture. He was also the first film critic for The Village Voice.
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Push processing in photography, sometimes called uprating, refers to a film developing technique that increases the effective sensitivity of the film being processed. Push processing involves developing the film for more time, possibly in combination with a higher temperature, than the manufacturer's recommendations. This technique results in effective overdevelopment of the film, compensating for underexposure in the camera.
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Film Culture was an American film magazine started by Adolfas Mekas and his brother Jonas Mekas in 1954. The publication's headquarters were in New York City. Best known for exploring the avant-garde cinema in depth, it also published articles on other aspects of cinema, including Hollywood films.
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. The film archive and theater is located at 32 Second Avenue on the southeast corner of East 2nd Street, in a New York City historic district in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
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American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol produced more than 600 films between 1963 and 1968, including short Screen Tests film portraits. His subsequent work with filmmaker Paul Morrissey guided the Warhol-branded films toward more mainstream success in the 1970s. Since 1984, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and worked to preserve, restore, exhibit, and distribute Warhol's underground films. In 2014, the MoMA began a project to digitize films previously unseen and to show them to the public.
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