On the night of July 25, 1964, Andy Warhol and filmmaker Jonas Mekas stood on the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building and for six hours, trained a camera on the Empire State Building. Shot on 1,200-foot rolls of 16mm film, Empire is an eight-hour-long stationery shot of the Art Deco masterpiece shifting beneath light and shadow, giving New York what Claude Monet gave Rouen in his famous studies, a monument to a monument. It’s worth a watch on any screen, but is best caught this weekend, when it plays in the Empire State Building itself.
In honor of the anniversary, the Museum of Modern Art has teamed up with the Andy Warhol Museum and the Empire State Building Observatory Experience for a screening of Empire on the 80th floor. The silent film will play from 9am through midnight. There’s no right time to go. On a clear morning, from the observatories, the entire length of Manhattan is visible; you can (probably) spot where Warhol shot the movie. After dark, you can appreciate the contradictions captured by the black-and-white film, of a city both romantic and remote.
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“As enigmatic and inspiring as its namesake point of focus, Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’ is a monument to the epic innovations of New York’s artists and filmmakers,” Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of film at MoMA said in a statement. “An essential work in MoMA’s collection, this film changed the way we experience cinema. Time, movement and drama all find new meaning in Empire.”
Like many of Warhol’s films, Empire has no obvious narrative, functioning as an experiment in cinematic viewing, or as Warhol said himself, an opportunity “to see time go by.” It’s a chance to see a bygone New York City too. That year, the top 30 floors of the Empire State Building were floodlighted for the first time, to mark the opening of the New York World’s Fair in Queens. For a blip in history, it was the only skyscraper with such an illuminated crown. An eyewitness called it “a chandelier suspended in the sky.”
Asked in 2014 why Warhol would dedicate hours to a movie that, upon its release, was divisive, even called boring, Mekas said, “the culprit is the Empire State Building itself.” Mekas, then 91, had a recommendation for moviegoers: Don’t be dissuaded by the monotony, at the two-hour mark, floodlights will burst to life, shattering the night.