Empire, c. 2016

How do you reconfigure the sky?

On the evening of July 25, 1964, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas began filming the Empire State building from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building.  They filmed continuously, from 8:06 p.m. until 2:42 a.m., shooting at a rate of 24 frames per second.  However, the resulting film, called Empire, is 89 minutes longer than their original footage: Empire is supposed to be projected at a rate of 16 frames per second, giving it a run time of 8 hours and 5 minutes. 

When not wholly dismissed (“a ‘film,’” wrote one contemporary critic, “arrogant in its disregard for any conceivable variety of public taste”), Empire is often valued for its use of time: The nearly static image of the Empire State Building highlights the minute changes on screen that mark time passing, and the occasional flares and white flashes that occur as a result of the developing process stress that film is a temporal medium.  Warhol himself said he made Empire  “to see time go by.”  

I see it differently: not time going by, but gone by.  True, the film does happen in real time, staging for the viewer an immediate experience, but it also captures an image from almost a half-century ago, a distance made all the more evident given the subsequent changes in the New York skyline.  In 1964, the Empire State Building was not only the tallest building in New York, but also the tallest building in the world.  In 1972, with the completion of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, it lost that status.  On September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks and the collapse of the Twin Towers, it again became the tallest building in the city, but no longer the world.  

Seen in this continuum, Empire becomes an experience of mediated time.  It centers a history that predates its creation and continues after any viewing of it.  (In 2014, One World Trade Center became the tallest building in New York, though not the world.)  Time here is both retro- and prospective, gone by in a world that goes on.  Empire, like footage of the Twin Towers before the attacks, haunts a future that hasn’t happened. Or has.