Эмпайр: Восемь часов и пять минут с Эмпайр-стейт-билдинг

1965 American black and white silent art film by Andy Warhol

Empire is a 1965 American black and white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The 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".

Empire was filmed at 24 frames per second, and is meant to be seen in slow motion at 16 frames per second, extending its 6 1/2 hour length to 8 hours and 5 minutes. The film consists of a stationary view of the Empire State Building lasting the entirety of the running time. The film begins with a blank white screen, a result of the camera being calibrated for nighttime filming. As the sun sets almost imperceptibly, the figure of the building emerges and its details become clearer. As the sun sets further, the building is enveloped in darkness. The building's floodlights are turned on, illuminating its upper levels and spire. Lights in the windows of other structures go on and off. In the background, a beacon atop the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower flashes at intervals corresponding to every 15 minutes in real time (it flashes a single time every 15 minutes and at hour it flashes the time of day).

The initial idea for Empire came from John Palmer, a young filmmaker affiliated with Jonas Mekas. Palmer had been sleeping occasionally on the roof of Mekas's Film Maker's Cooperative, which had an impressive view of the tower, only a few blocks away. He told Mekas that he thought an image of the floodlit building would make a good Warhol film, and Mekas passed the idea to Warhol. Around the time Warhol considered the idea, he had completed (in late 1963) his first extended length film, the 5 hour Sleep, which shows multiple views of a man sleeping; Empire was his second long film. In April 1964, the upper 30 floors of the Empire State Building were floodlighted for the first time in connection with the opening of the New York World's Fair in Queens. As the only floodlit skyscraper in New York City, The floodlights were essential to Warhol's concept for the film, as there would be almost nothing to see without them. In the Rockefeller Foundation office, Mekas framed the shot for Warhol's approval, and filming commenced at 8:06 pm, about ten minutes before sunset. Mekas' article about the shooting printed in the Village Voice the next week described a lighthearted night of filmmaking, with Warhol discoursing on the Empire State Building as the most prominent site in New York, visited by celebrities and tourists alike, and various people in the room imploring Warhol to pan the camera. Each reel contains a segment of film that was exposed to incidental light during processing, which may be evidence that the final work is unedited. The complete film consists of ten reels, each lasting approximately 48 minutes when projected in slow motion at 16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol. After the film had been developed and printed, Warhol did not have funds to pay the processor, and Palmer arranged with his mother to make the payment. In recognition of his role in conceiving, assisting with and paying for the film, Warhol listed Palmer as co director. then the site of Mekas' Film Makers' Cinematheque. Reporting on the premiere in his Village Voice column, Mekas did not state how many people were in the 576 seat theater, but claimed that after the film had been running for ten minutes, 30 or 40 people surrounded him and another staff member demanding their money back, "threatening to solve the question of the new vision and the new cinema by breaking chairs on our heads". Apart from Mekas' articles, the only other extended discussion of the film around the time of its release is in two articles in Film Culture, a journal of experimental cinema that Mekas and his brother published. Gregory Battcock, a critic who was part of Warhol's circle and appears in several of his films, connected the film with other works by Warhol in terms of its focus on a subject that the viewer already generally knows. He argued this left space to emphasize other issues, particularly the physical medium of film, and the artistic use of long duration as a way of concentrating attention on these qualities. Battcock also observed that Empire had quickly become a classic of the avant garde and promised to have great if unpredictable influence on the development of film. In 1966, Warhol and his colleagues began producing events featuring rock band the Velvet Underground; these went by several names, ultimately becoming best known as the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable." In addition to the Velvet Underground, the Exploding Plastic Inevitables featured simultaneous mixes of strobe lights, dancers, colored slides and film projections. Advertisements for the events held in the spring of 1966 in New York's East Village mention Empire among other Warhol films to be screened.

Warhol withdrew most of his film catalog (including Empire) from circulation in 1972. Film historian Callie Angell observed that the inaccessibility of the film until some years after Warhol's death in 1987, along with the assumption that a film such as Empire must be unwatchable, gave Empire a life mainly as an idea about a film that expressed Warhol's outrageousness as an artist, with some accounts lengthening it to 10 or 24 hours. In 1988, the film began to be screened again as part of the cataloguing and restoration of Warhol's films undertaken by several institutions. In 1992, the original negative was rediscovered and used to make new prints of the film.