Empire (Andy Warhol et al., 1965)

Saturday, January 12 at 1 p.m., the Whitney Museum of American Art, in conjunction with their Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again exhibit, showed Warhol's silent Empire at 16fps making for a screening of eight hours and five minutes. It was one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life. Below are some thoughts on the screening divided into three sections: the experience of the environment, the experience of the film, and the aftermath.

I. Without Me

I stayed for the entire film with two brief-as-possible potty breaks. It was impossible to determine how many people lasted from beginning to end (start to stop?) since many people filtered in and out of the extremely dark theatre. But I would wager that the core group of fellow intrepid travelers comprised about ten people, no more than fifteen. I brought several fig bars, two beef/pork sticks, and two coconut waters (thanks to Blake Gopnik's suggestion in a New York Times article detailing his experience seeing it at 18fps in 2014 at the James Fuentes Gallery). 

I was in procedural terror for days before the screening. It's preposterous to discuss authenticity in relation to Warhol but would there be any rules? Would it be a happening? Could I last? What if I fell asleep or, worse, snored?  I knew my buddy Whit Strub was going too. Do I sit by him? Could I last? 

I arrived around 12:45 and sat one seat away from Whit. We talked with the gentleman behind us for a bit. Whit later told me he was a retired Poli Sci professor who was spending his free time absorbing culture. He confessed that he would stay only until about 4pm and indeed, three hours into the film, he leaned in to us and whispered (paraphrasing), "Gentlemen, remember to tell Sparta of your heroism" before departing.

About an hour into the film, a group of twentysomethings entered. One gal took several pictures and maybe a video of the screen. Another who arrived a bit later (and whispered with a gal in the first group) sat in the row in front of us and was buried in her phone almost the entire time. I looked over and discovered that she was on Instagram (I believe) and I caught her typing the words "video [sic] of...minutes of the fucking...Building!"

It's difficult to police reception of a Warhol film especially one as environmental as Empire. But for better or worse, the Whitney set the conditions of reception as silence in the dark. No Velvets, no Woronov/Malanga wielding whips, no silver clouds. In those conditions, it would prove absurd to request reverent silence. And here, I wasn't initially annoyed by the cell phone intrusion. It could help pass the time if need be. But the Instagram harangue irked me. And when it was clear that this group was staying a while, I grew nervous about future interruptions and wanted to yell, "Do I go to your Avengers-ass movies and ruin those? No! So don't do it here!" or "Why are you even here?!?" Instead, Whit lost patience and seethed "Turn your cell phone off, please!" at cell phone gal who soon left.

I'm glad I didn't say what I wanted. During the first potty break, I ran into a guy staying for the duration too. Turns out he's a NYU professor teaching a JanTerm course called The Age of Warhol (!) (and author of the 33 1/3 on Marquee Moon I found out later!) and those were his students. He apologized for their behavior because he told them that Warhol screenings could be raucous events. I shrugged, we discussed reception for a bit, and then it was back to the Empire. 

Feeling emboldened, I later scolded the matriarch of a noisy family. She was already seated yet felt compelled to use her iPhone flashlight to look around the theatre. "You can turn that off," I curtly suggested and they remained in silence for a respectable five minutes. Hour six saw a lot of activity: a man looking at Warhol pictures on his phone who left in a huff after I asked him to turn it off; a family with two young children who stayed approximately one minute with a father who almost killed himself tripping up the stairs; a woman who opened the door and exclaimed in loud, hilarious New Yawkese "the Empire State Building!" The NYU professor got vigilant and went to the door several times to request silence before entering.

II. Within Me

On the morning of the screening, my procedural terror morphed into excitement. And now I have difficulty recreating that terror. For the most shocking aspect of the Empire experience is how easy it was to watch. With no perversity implied, I submit that it was much more difficult for me to sit through many feature-length art films, L'enfant secret (Philippe Garrel, 1979, 92 minutes), say, or most Godard, than Empire. This is because I entered what Douglas Crimp calls, in his book "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol, Warhol's time. In an section on watching several Warhol films at the MoMA Film Study Center with Jonathan Flatley (author of the superb essay "Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia" in Pop Out: Queer Warhol), Crimp notes, “Jonathan and I remarked to each other after our final day’s screenings that our sense of time had been utterly altered by the experience. On the simplest level, we had become completely relaxed about how much time was passing and not at all impatient at the films’ usually long-seeming duration. We felt at that moment as if we could go on watching Warhol films for days on end and continue to enjoy the experience thoroughly.” For me, this is a warm, cozy feeling I associate with Christmas as a child or hanging out with friends I no longer see like Pope and Jean-Guy in Montréal at the start of my grad student life. There were moments when the severity, if not the sadism, of the film blew me back. But overall, it felt like a gift, an extended stay at a day spa or a fuzzily defined sense of care washing over me. I came to it but it came to me. I was genuinely sad when I saw the increased scuzziness of the final reel heralding that the end was just seconds away.

For the first hour, the image is evenly lit so that you can make out the details in the Empire State Building and see downtown to the southwest. But then the floodlights go on (less noteworthy than reported since it occurs so early in the film) and the viewer is treated to an extremely high-contrast image of the lights which makes up the majority of the film. Much more shocking is that the floodlights go off and for the last 70 minutes, the film is complete darkness save for a few lights that form a vague Big Dipper pattern. No one entered during this time but it would have been fascinating to gauge the responses to staring at a "nothing" even more extreme than the Empire State Building's floodlights. 

The true star of Empire is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower eleven blocks to the southeast, Eve to the Empire State Building's Margo Channing. The tower features a light at the top that in real time blinks off every fifteen minutes and then blinks the number at the top of each hour. Since Empire is shown at 16fps, however, these occur at approximately 20 minutes and 70 minutes respectively in screen time. The first time I looked at my phone (apart from the first potty break at around 4:15 p.m.) was 6:50 p.m. not out of boredom or impatience but to time the blinks. These blinks were the friendliest aspect of Empire, lending the film a built-in metronome and grounding the Empire State Building's floodlights in space and time. The tower light shone the brightest during the last 70 minutes, much brighter than the faint antenna light on top of the Empire State Building which blinked incessantly but was easy to lose in the darkness. 

This Google Maps shot shows the positions of the two monuments along with the Time-Life Building from where the film was shot on the 41st floor. 

A window several floors below the floodlights remained lit for several hours. You can barely see it if you click on the picture at the top. Later I noticed it was off. But I never saw the moment it was extinguished. I call this light Li'l Window Dude. 

For a few seconds, Warhol appears and, more clearly, Jonas Mekas (along with four panes) in a reflection in the window. They turned on a light to reload the film and three (four?) times they forgot to turn it off before filming. This reinforces two realities about Empire: 1. It is not one continuous shot which would have been impossible with film. There are slight variations in each reel. 2. The film was originally credited to both Warhol and John Palmer, star of Warhol's John and Ivy (1965) and also visible in the film. And the concept of filming the Empire State Building was Mekas' idea. So the question of authorship is vexed in typical Warholian fashion.

Against the ceaseless image of the Empire State Building, the flares, hairs, and air bubbles on the film become events which the Digital Noise Reduction of a Blu-ray would eliminate (along with remaining captive to the film's duration, the best reason to see Empire on celluloid in a theatre). These elements compete with the core image for your attention, most intensely for a stretch where a ghost of the film, sprockets and all, floats on top somewhat akin to the material skidding in Little Dog for Roger (Malcolm Le Grice, 1967).

Finally, there are the perceptual tricks the film plays on the viewer. During the first hour, you try to focus on one part of the building. But the grain of the film starts to mimic movement that is not actually happening, a swarm of locusts accumulating or perhaps a gas leak wafting by one area. Turn your head slightly to either side and a black rectangle follows, a canted image of the frame that has been imprinted on your retina for so long. Sometimes you couldn't get the floodlights to render depth; other times you couldn't find their two-dimensional pictoriality again. Did the building just jump out at me?

III. Us 

After the screening, Whit, the NYU prof (one of his students stayed for about three hours!), and I chatted and were soon joined by a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia. He emailed us his notes (sample nuggets: "About an hour forty five in I quietly move to the leftmost seat in the front row so that the parallax distortion of the image mimics the view of the Empire out my kitchen window" and "I dream of having an Insomnia cookie") and we shared our experiences. Apparently, someone towards the front was crying and everyone but me heard soft chanting at one point. 

At dinner afterward, Whit asked me to what extent my mind wandered during the film. I surmised it would be impossible to watch every minute of it in rapt attention. Certainly, there were moments when I snapped into philosophical mode, trying to fashion some sort of connection to sexploitation films of the era. But there were many more where I coasted in and out of lucid dreaming or kept repeating the Migos and disco I was listening to on the ride down to the Whitney. And I still remain stunned by how easy it all was, more sybaritic and opulent than some sort of severe exercise. 

Whit also noted that the core audience read as white men almost entirely including the four professors in conference at the end. Not sure how to address this fact except to suggest that the Whitney should revive the 8-hour Park Lanes (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2015) which they screened in 2016. 

Empire will be showing again at the Whitney on Saturday, March 9, 2019 at 1 p.m.