Displaying items by tag: empire

 A new partnership between the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and The Warhol in Pittsburgh will help preserve Andy Warhol’s entire film collection. Approximately 500 of the Pop artist’s films, which have resided in MoMA’s collection since the early 1990s, will be digitized. The award-winning visual effects company MPC will assist in the frame-by-frame scanning of over 1,000 rolls of 16mm film and the subsequent conversion to high resolution images. The project, which begins this month, is expected to take several years to complete.

While a few Warhol films such as “Empire” (1964) and “The Chelsea Girls” (1966) are icons of avant-garde cinema, many of the works in MoMA’s collection have never been seen by the public.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s iconic “Empire,” the experimental film will be shown continuously in the Fifth Avenue lobby of New York City’s Empire State Building. The screening, which will take place throughout the month of July, will be complemented by images of Warhol’s art and details of his life and filmmaking.

“Empire” is a silent black-and-white film that consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building. Filming began on the night of July 25-26, 1964, from 8:10pm to 2:30am from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in the Rockefeller Foundation office. Punctuated by the Empire State Building’s changing lights and the sky above, “Empire” is hailed as an avant-garde masterpiece, challenging viewers with its daunting running time, yet raising profound questions about time, subject, and personal reflection. When explaining the film, Warhol said, “I never liked the idea of picking out certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because...it’s not like life...what I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment.”