“Empire” is a film by Andy Warhol consisting of eight hours straight of the Empire State Building, doing nothing.
Warhol filmed the skyscraper between about 8:10 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. on July 25 and 26, 1964 from the 41st floor of the Time & Life building using a rented 16mm Arriflex camera push-processed to ASA 1000 to compensate for the dark conditions of filming which gives the film its graininess. It was filmed at 24 frames per second and is meant to be seen in slow motion at 16 frames per second, extending the 6 1/2 hour length of the film to 8 hours and 5 minutes.
The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was once the tallest in New York City. According to Warhol, the purpose of the film - perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work - is 'to see time go by'.
To all of us, time is valuable, time is precious. Warhol knew this and he chose to spend his time to bring us 'Empire'.
"Empire" had its premier on Saturday, March 6, 1965 at the City Hall Cinema, 170 Nassau Street, in Manhattan.
Invitation card to the first screening of Empire
Making a film score for Andy Warhol's 'Empire' was a unique challenge. At over eight hours long and with so little happening on screen, how does one create a soundtrack that can engage the audience in witnessing 'the passing of time' as Warhol wrote about 'Empire', whilst not drawing overt attention to the score itself and away from the film?
As Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by", by definition it never repeats. Adkins followed with a work that never repeats for the whole duration of the film.
To structure the work Adkins used a bell-ringing pattern—NY Littleport Caters, first rung on 23rd October 2016 in New York. The bell ringing sequence (and I’ll simply quote the liner notes here) is an example of change-ringing technique—in which the nine bells are permuted continuously for several hours. From this Adkins created a nine-chord harmonic sequence each with nine layers of sonic material including old instruments and other ambient sounds recorded in large architectural structures. The Warhol film is stored on 10 film reels of 48 minutes each. In Adkin's piece nine permutations occur every 48 minutes—the length of one of ten reels of film for 'Empire'. The bell-pattern cycles through nine iterations, the combination of layers being unique in each occurrence.
When viewing the film the attention of the audience is drawn to the tiniest detail, for example when a flash bulb goes off close to the top of the building. The little subtle moments we take for granted suddenly become interesting. It becomes a sort of meditation. Adkins work has a similar effect on the listener. As you are drawn slowly into the depths of the piece you hear the tiniest changes of detail. It documents the passage of time.
How does Adkins keep the listener involved? We choose what we hear when listening; our listening contours the sound that we hear; we have the capacity to transform material so it becomes filled with our ideas, our preoccupations of what we should hear. Listening is not a holistic event. You extract only what you want from the moment by making that part your focus
The 51 minutes of the album release presents the prime bell ringing harmonic sequence in their original order (1 to 9) and concludes with a section of sound taken from the tenth film reel which has almost completely lost the original melodic sequence and supplemented it with additional distortion added to emphasize the increasing sense of being lost in the total darkness and the graininess of the film. As it fades away it leaves the listener lost in the depths of the art as viewers of Warhols film must have felt when night enveloped the Empire State Building.