Watch Andy Warhol’s Eight-Hour Film About the Empire State Building on the Skyscraper’s 80th Floor

This weekend, an eight-hour silent film by Pop artist Andy Warhol will be playing at the Empire State Building’s 80th-floor observatory. Titled Empire, the movie is all about the famous skyscraper: It’s a continuous black-and-white shot of the building starting at dusk and ending at around 3 a.m. It’s also in slow motion, which is why it stretches to eight hours.

Warhol released the film in 1964. The screening, organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is a celebration of the film’s 60th anniversary.

“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,” says Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s chief curator of film, in a statement, per Artnet’s Sarah Cascone. “This film changed the way we experience cinema. Time, movement and drama all find new meaning in Empire.”

Warhol directed Empire alongside John Palmer, a young filmmaker who also came up with the concept. Jonas Mekas, the Village Voice critic and founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives, shot the film from the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building.

The experimental film invites viewers to contemplate the passage of time. If audiences sit through the whole thing, they’ll see the Empire State Building in different kinds of light as the sun sets over Manhattan.

But when it premiered, Empire was quite divisive.

“The first theatrical screening at Jonas Mekas’ American Cinematheque, according to Mekas, caused a near riot,” Kelly Gordon, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, told Smithsonian magazine’s Joseph Stromberg in 2011. “People became restless, then agitated, and finally many stormed the box office for a refund.”

Since then, critics’ opinions have changed. Many began hailing Empire as a groundbreaking, innovative work. In 2004, the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.

“If great works of art can be thought of as machines for thinking, triggering ideas by the dozen, then Empire is a Rolls-Royce: It keeps us thinking about what film is and does, what great buildings are all about and even how and why we look at things,” wrote the New York Times’ Blake Gopnik in 2014, when Empire turned 50.

Gopnik attended a similar celebratory screening that year, vowing to sit through the whole thing. He took more than 5,000 words of notes throughout the film’s duration. Meanwhile, other viewers wandered into the room, but nobody stayed longer than seven minutes. “You understand as much from viewing such a tiny segment of Empire as you would from viewing just a postage-stamp patch on the Mona Lisa,” he wrote.

The film is playing at the Empire State Building between now and July 28. In addition to the screening, guests can check out other exhibits on the 80th floor, such as artist Stephen Wiltshire’s detailed landscape drawing of New York City, or look through the skyscraper’s viewfinders to see panoramic views of Manhattan.

There is no requirement to stay for all eight hours of the film’s runtime—so hopefully, there won’t be any riots this time.

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.