"The Empire State Building is a star!" - Andy Warhol

"There's an English word for the people who think the movie EMPIRE is the height...It is snob....to hell with all this pretentious bullshit." - Paul Morrissey

It may seem a provocation to screen an eight-hour and five-minute, static shot of a building, but to show a severely truncated version of Warhol's most conceptual and abstract film is to prevent the very provocation that its existence presents. EMPIRE is a portrait in extremis of an icon and itself an icon of the avant-garde. This notorious epic was filmed - with the help of John Palmer, Jonas Mekas, and Gerard Malanga - from dusk to dawn on July 25 and 26, from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Time-Life building on the corner of 50th and Avenue of the Americas, whose south-facing windows lent an unobstructed view of the tallest building in Manhattan. The film begins in a white wash, blindingly overexposed, and as the sun sets, the image of the Empire State Building slowly emerges as if from a romantic fog. "Apart from its phallic joke, its play on postcards and its hilarious revision of a tradition encompassing Monet's cathedrals and Cézanne's mountains, it delivers the longest 'establishing shot' in movie history" (Paul Arthur). The exterior floodlights come on and the tip of the tower shimmers like the spire of the Chrysler building; the lights flicker on and off for the next six and a half hours, in a brazen display of film's fundamental formal properties. Finally, the floodlights are extinguished in the penultimate reel and the remainder of the film unfolds in near complete darkness, allowing for a sustained meditation on cinema itself, its materiality and the status of representation. While EMPIRE has enjoyed newfound currency within gallery and museum