Empire

EN

“Back to primitive: the filmmaker himself is the DP, he doesn’t even operate the camera – just walks away. It’s like the camera was seeing for itself. With the superfluity of images today, this film reminds us of the simple beauty of the film material itself – the patience, the act of watching film, lights being turned on in the building. Warhol remains one of the artists who are truly an inspiration.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul1

“Last Saturday I was present at a historical occasion: the shooting of Andy Warhol’s epic Empire. From 8 P.M. until dawn the camera was pointed at the Empire State Building, from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building. The camera never moved once. My guess is that Empire will become the Birth of a Nation of the New Bag Cinema.

The following are excerpts from a conversation with the Warhol crew – Henry X., John Palmer, Marie Desert, and the poet Gerard Malanga:
John: Why is nothing happening? I don’t understand. Henry: What would you like to happen? John: I don’t know. Henry: I have a feeling that all we’re filming is the red light. Andy: Oh, Henry!!! Henry: Andy?! NOW IS THE TIME TO PAN. John: Definitely not! Henry: The film is a whole new bag when the lights go off. John: Look at all that action going on. Those flashes. Tourists taking photos. Andy: Henry, what is the meaning of action? Henry: Action is the absence of inaction. Andy: Let’s say things intelligent. Gerard: Listen! We don’t want to deceive the public, dear. John: We’re hitting a new milestone. Andy: Henry, say Nietzsche. Henry: Another aphorism? John: B movies are better than A movies. Andy: Jack Smith in every garage. Marie: Someday we’re all going to live underground and this movie will be a smash.

John: The lack of action in the last three 1200-foot rolls is alarming! Henry: You have to mark these rolls very carefully so as not to get them mixed up. Jonas: Did you know that the Empire State Building sways? Marie: I read somewhere that art is created in fun. Jonas: What? Gerard: During the projection, we should set up window panes for the audience to look through. Andy: The Empire State Building is a star! John: Has anything happened at all?! Marie: No. John: Good! Henry: The script calls for a pan right at this point. I don’t see why my artistic advice is being constantly rejected. Henry to Andy: The bad children are smoking pot again. John: I don’t think anything has happened in the last hundred feet. Gerard: Jonas, how long is this interview supposed to be? Jonas: As much as you have. Andy: An eight-hour hard-on! Gerard: We have to maintain our cool at all times. John: We have to have this film licensed. Andy: It looks very phallic. Jonas: I don’t think it will pass. John: Nothing has happened in the last half-hour. John: The audience viewing Empire will be convinced after seeing the film that they have viewed it from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building, and that’s a whole bag in itself. Isn’t that fantastic? Jonas: I don’t think the last reel was a waste. Henry to John: I think it’s too playful.”

Jonas Mekas2

 

Andy Warhol: [...] Sartre said that every style reveals a metaphysic. My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case “run on” – manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. Isn’t that the true profanity? Watch a man sleep for two minutes? No; why not watch him sleep for six hours? [Warhol alludes to his 1963 film Sleep.] Everything changes even when it doesn’t appear to. The meaning of Sleep, you could say, is that there is no stasis in human existence. Nor in nature. In Empire [1964] I filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours. The building didn’t change but the daylight did. That has a long and honoured pedigree in art, yet when people are warned that something is “revolutionary”, they don’t see the evolutionary. When Monet painted his haystacks or his Rouen cathedrals, no one said, “That’s enough,” after the third one.

Nigel Andrews: Or maybe they did!

Yes, maybe they did – plus ça change…The philistines will be always with us. In any case, to address another misconception, I was not imposing these films as endurance trials. I was not saying: “Sit and suffer. I dare you to watch the unwatchable.” You could always go out for popcorn. Jonas Mekas [...] screened Kiss in instalments and at the second screening tied me to a chair with a rope to watch it. At the end of the screening, he found only loosened ropes. I had gone out for popcorn; I’m a movie-goer like anyone else!

Andy Warhol in conversation with Nigel Andrews3

“It is hard to imagine anything more pure, less staged, and less directed than Andy Warhol’s Eat, Empire, Sleep, Haircut movies. I think that Andy Warhol is the most revolutionary of all film-makers working today. He is opening to film-makers a completely new and inexhaustible field of cinema reality. It is not a prediction but a certainty that soon we are going to see dozens of Eat, Haircut, or Street movies done by different film-makers, and there will be good and bad and mediocre Eat movies, and very good Eat movies, and someone will make a masterpiece Eat movie. What to some still looks like actionless nonsense, with the shift of our consciousness which is taking place will become an endless variety and an endless excitement of seeing similar subjects or the same subject done differently by different artists. Instead of asking for Elephant Size Excitement we’ll be able to find aesthetic enjoyment in the subtle play of nuances.

There is something religious about this. It is part of that ‘beat mentality’ which Cardinal Spellman attacked this week. There is something very humble and happy about a man (or a movie) who is content with eating an apple. It is a cinema that reveals the emergence of meditation and happiness in man. Eat your apple, enjoy your apple, it says. Where are you running? Away from yourself? To what excitement? If all people could sit and watch the Empire State Building for eight hours and meditate upon it, there would be no more wars, no hate, no terror – there would be happiness regained upon earth.”

Jonas Mekas4

• 1James Quandt, ed., Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 252.
• 2Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal. The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 150-151.
• 3Nigel Andrews, “The real Andy Warhol?,” The Financial Times, 24 August 2007.
• 4Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal. The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 154-155.