Released on March 6, 1965, Andy Warhol’s Empire was the pop art forefather’s second full-length feature. The monumental spectre of the film’s (inanimate) cast towered over its meagre plotline, which comprised a stationary, six-and-a-half-hour take of New York’s Empire State Building, shot by Warhol from the 41st floor of an opposing Rockefeller Foundation-owned skyscraper, through the duration of an agonisingly slow sunset. The off-the-bat premise may sound curious at best, pointless at worst. But in the heyday of the action-packed motion picture and star-studded big-budget epics, Warhol (an entirely self-taught filmmaker) attempted the opposite of what even the most audacious cinematic experiments had tried before him – he directed a movie that doesn’t, in fact, move.
A working-class queer boy from Pittsburgh, Warhol didn’t really care about impressing his arthouse establishment coevals with a flurry of reshuffled narrative codes. He didn’t slave over enigmatic dialogue peppered with fl ashes of arcane erudition, or leftfield cinematography quizzically sewn together into a moral, political or human parable for the times. In its quiet, static majesty, Empire aimed to “see time go by”; it used the medium of movement to showcase stillness – the creative vessel of action to liberate the meaning harnessed by inaction. Well beyond a mere internal restructuring of the same old paradigms pulsating beneath the movie veneer, Warhol reinvented cinema by, literally, not doing it. “Andy Warhol is the most revolutionary of all filmmakers working today, ” wrote poet, artist and was shot. Decades later, its impact is still felt.
