A musical event took place in New York yesterday, 8 hours of solid sound – a live accompaniment from Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler and Jan Jelenik to Andy Warhol’s Empire – a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building. The eight-hour, five-minute film, which is typically shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened Empire’s running time by projecting the film at a speed of sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of twenty-four frames per second, thus making the progression to darkness almost imperceptible. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time. According to Warhol, the point of this film – perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work – is to “see time go by.”
Angry dragon
The shot was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. on July 25-26, 1964. 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. Warhol conceived a new relationship of the viewer to film in Empire and other early works, which are silent, explore perception, and establish a new sense of cinematic time. With their disengagement, lack of editing, and lengthy nonevents, these films were intended to be part of a larger environment. They also parody the goals of his avant-garde contemporaries who sought to convey the human psyche through film or used the medium as metaphor.
The live soundtrack / concert / event kicked off the Unsound festival. Krakow’s Unsound festival is working with local cultural institutes, organizers, curators and venues in New York to produce Unsound Festival New York. This 12-day event involves concerts, club nights, specially commissioned work, panel discussions, workshops, exhibitions and video screening. It will take place across Manhattan and Brooklyn, revealing connections between music genres and audiences, ranging from experimental to club orientated music. Later this week We Love… favourite Carl Craig will be performing a live electronic soundtrack to Warhol’s 1964, Factory shot, 35 minute long silent film Blowjob which depicts the face of an unaccredited man as he receives fellatio from an unseen partner.
Other acts appearing at various venues during the festival are Untold, Petre Inspirescu, Newworldaquarium, Moritz von Oswald and Vladislav Delay.
Tags: Andrew Pekler, Andy Warhol, Avant-Garde, Carl Craig, Empire, Film, Hanno Leichtmann, Jan Jelenik, Live, Moritz von Oswald, New York, Newworldaquarium, Petre Inspirescu, Unsound, Untold, Vladislav Delay
