By Michael Ewins.
Empire, directed by Andy Warhol, 1964
Unsurprisingly for Warhol – who had just completed silkscreens of Elvis, Monroe, and Jackie O – the film is all face. We’re looking at the Empire State Building, which in 1964 was 33 years old, the same age as Elvis in the Comeback Special, Monroe in Some Like It Hot, and Jackie when she was named TIME’s Woman of the Year. The crew (Jonas Mekas, John Palmer, Gerard Malenga, Marie Desert, Henry Romney) are assembled on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building. It’s near dusk. Mekas frames the shot and at 0:01 Warhol walks away. The ‘star’ is centre stage, while a cluster of shorter buildings occupy the bottom of the frame. Time starts to pass. Clouds drift imperceptibly. Then, at 0:59, something remarkable: the minute ticks over without event. Nothing happens.
The film continues for 484 minutes.
Empire is often described as a real-time film, meaning that the duration of depicted events are equal to the time it takes to watch them. But this turns out not to be true, because Empire is projected at sixteen rather than twenty-four frames per second. It’s nothing in slow-motion, and the audience will spend an extra 95 minutes watching this shot than the crew spent filming it. The real real-time was happening on television, as J.G. Ballard asserts when remembering the events of 1963: “You saw the Vietnam War virtually live. Oswald was shot dead live on TV.” Empire unfolds in cinematic time, an extended durée that draws attention to the cinema-space and other spectators as much as to the film itself. Warhol wanted the audience of Empire to “get more acquainted with themselves,” a task he facilitated by encouraging them to arrive “anytime,” leave for a hamburger and soda and then come back, chat, smoke, dance, and drop out when the experience had run its course.
David Bordwell has observed that “every film trains its spectator” on how to watch it. But how to watch a film that doesn’t want, or need, to be watched – a film that, according to Callie Angell, the first person to watch Empire in full, “has thrived on a purely conceptual level since its creation.” What does the study of Minute 9 count for in a not-real-time real-time film in which minute nine for the makers and minute nine for the audience are different, and – in composition and action – are ostensibly the same as minutes 59, 299, and 369? What could happen in minute nine that hasn’t already, or won’t happen in all other minutes?
In Minute 9, this is what happens. Clouds drift imperceptibly. At 9:34, a plane – which at this distance looks like one of the models from King Kong (1933) – enters screen-right. At 9:50 it disappears behind the Empire, appearing again at 9:53. At 9:59, it’s still crawling toward screen-left. This is not the first plane sighting in Empire, but compared to the action of the second minute, when two aircraft complete their screen-crossings between 1:27 – 1:57, and pass mid-flight at 1:40, minute nine introduces a significant temporal variation – somehow it feels as if the film slows down.
By unsticking this minute from all other minutes, a subtle rhythmic variation emerges, a form of un-heard music in this completely silent film. Before he and John Palmer proposed the idea of Empire to Warhol, Jonas Mekas took Andy to a concert on Second Avenue where La Monte Young “was doing pieces of music like stretching one note to six hours, to four hours.” In 1964, Young started his (ongoing) Well-Tuned Piano work, a piece that typically lasts up to six hours. In 1963, John Cage conducted a recital of Erik Satie’s Vexations (1894) which lasted over 18 hours. Warhol’s mingling with The Velvet Underground’s members may also have inspired the ‘composition’ of Empire, as Lou Reed recalls Warhol asking, “why does the record ever have to end?” But the music emerging from New York at this time was changing temporality itself. The music wasn’t ending. In Monolithic Undertow, Harry Sword relates a story from composer Morton Subotnick, who had been invited to listen to part of a new Young composition. After forty minutes, Subotnick relented. “How long is it?” “Oh,” Young replied, “the full piece is five weeks long.”
In Leaving the Movie Theater, Barthes likens the moment of leaving a film to coming out of hypnosis. He “thinks of music: isn’t there such a thing as hypnotic music? The castrato Farinelli, whose messa di voce was “as incredible for its duration as for its emission,” relieved the morbid melancholy of Philip V of Spain by singing him the same aria every night for fourteen years.” Screenings of Empire would begin with Beethoven’s Fifth before plunging into eight-hour silence, though with Warhol’s prompt to eat, chat, and dance, no screening would be completely silent. In this sense, the work it most resembles is Cage’s 4’33”, a temporal parenthesis in which to experience a sonic environment usually covered by ‘produced’ sound. Viewing the film at home, on YouTube (where the rip truly is silent), even more possibilities arise for environmental and participatory spectatorship. In her Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno calls film an “imaginative architectural toy,” and Empire throws up a variety of ways to be played with – as ‘moving’ wallpaper, a meditative nightlight, or centre-piece of a party (Warhol sometimes exhibited his films as visual accompaniment to VU gigs).
The film will become ever-more flexible as new technologies and artists embrace the material. In 2003, Michael Snow remade his 1967 work Wavelength – a forty-five-minute zoom from one end of a loft onto a photograph pinned to the opposite wall – as the fifteen-minute WVLNT: Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have The Time. Perhaps inspired by this project, YouTube user alterquia has uploaded a “version for the 21st century” titled Andy Warhol, Empire (1964): 8 hours of film in 2 minutes. Here, you can mainline Empire as a dose of pure New York punk. Clouds billow and bulge before night falls like an eclipse over the city. In this version, minute nine happens somewhere before the first second.
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Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
8. Jessica Sequeiro.
9. Christine Hume
10. Jeff Wood
11. Alexander B. Joy
12. Des Barry
13. Marcel Krueger
14. Alexis Forss
15. Sam Ishii-Gonzales
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Ewins is a bookseller based in Stratford-upon-Avon. His writing has appeared in Sight & Sound, Dazed & Confused, Senses of Cinema, and Media Magazine, among others. He contributed the booklet essays for Second Run’s release of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinetta, and Arrow Video’s release of Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction.
