Andy Warhol Gallery
Empire. 1964.
16mm film, black and white, silent, 8 hours, 6 minutes (approx.).
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Film Preservation Program.
Museum of Modern Art.

Empire consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building taken from the forty-fourth floor of the Time-Life Building. Jonas Mekas served as cameraman. The shot was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. on July 25–26, 1964. Empire consists of a number of one-hundred-foot rolls of film, each separated from the next by a flash of light. Each segment of film constitutes a piece of time. Warhol's clear delineation of the individual segments of film can be likened to the serial repetition of images in his silkscreen paintings, which also acknowledge their process and materials.

Warhol conceived a new relationship of the viewer to film in Empire and other early works, which are silent, explore perception, and establish a new sense of cinematic time. With their disengagement, lack of editing, and lengthy nonevents, these films were intended to be part of a larger environment. They also parody the goals of his avant-garde contemporaries who sought to convey the human psyche through film or used the medium as metaphor.

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Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh. He is a founder and major figure of the POP ART movement. Warhol pioneered the development of the process whereby an enlarged photographic image is transferred to a silk screen that is then placed on a canvas and inked from the back. It was this technique that enabled him to produce the series of mass-media images - repetitive, yet with slight variations. These, incorporating such items as Campbell's Soup cans, dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and the faces of celebrities, comment on the banality, harshness, and ambiguity of American culture. Andy traveled around the country with The Velvet Underground (Lou Reed and John Cale). In 1968, Valerie Solanis, a rejected superstar, came into The Factory and shot Andy three times, he was pronounced dead, but after having his chest cut open, he survived.
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