A Warholian Empire
Stare at this picture for a while. Having a nice time? Good, then you’ll love the 8 hour, 5 minute (give or take) stationary shot movie version. One of its most riveting features is the light blinking on top of the building to the left. Directed by Andy Warhol in 1964, “Empire” was selected by the online magazine Nerve as one of “The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.” They said it is “a film that can almost literally hypnotize you with its simple beauty and repetitiveness.”
This is an example of Repetition Taken To The Extreme (RTTTE – a term and repetitive acronym I just made up) and as such functions in two ways. First is the experience of the thing (movie) itself. The second is the experience of the idea of the thing. Not that many people will ever see the full movie but many more will give it some thought unencumbered by the 8 hour gaping hole in their life. It’s the second thing that I think is more important. If you watch the movie you will undoubtedly be bored as hell. But if you sit and think about the idea of the movie then you can see it from afar, consider it without the burden of it.
This from MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art),
“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.”
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