Empire (1965)

Directed by

Andy Warhol

Genre

documentary film, silent film

Country

United States

Runtime

8h 05m

Rating

4.3 of 10 from 44 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is an eight-hour silent film of a single static shot of the Empire State Building in New York City. There is no story or characters, just the building and the slow passage of time.

statichypnoticminimalistslowmeditativeabstractboringexperimental

What happens

Empire is a 1965 American underground film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion black-and-white footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The silent film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by." A week after the film was shot, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who was cinematographer for Empire) speculated in the Village Voice that Warhol's film would have a profound influence on avant-garde cinema. In 2004, Empire was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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