Based on the film Empire by Andy Warhol, I come up with a question, ‘If a film that stimulates the reality, intends to engaging audience into the atmosphere, why it lasts such long time? Why can’t the film only last 1 hour that contains the flash the Empire lights up?’ The answer maybe reel vs real. As Bruno says, ‘they are cinematic ‘meditations’ on real matters. Real performances, they look at how reality itself matters.’ Warhol subverted the traditional film form. Empire can be a kind of anti-film, or, it expanded the range of film. It is more than ‘take a look outside your window’, it is a kind of exposed. Empire maybe not a film intends to let audience appreciate it from the beginning to the end, but a film tells reality — time, architecture, place… matters. Film like Empire doesn’t act as a medium that arouses people’s thoughts, it is reel/reality itself: eat is eat, sleep is sleep, only time flies.
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Bruno refers to this as “… a radical refashioning of a politics of time. … A politics of time means giving space to time” (p,94). “Empire” is definitely not an everyday film. It was produced as a critique, “… anticipated recent trends in art installation, foreseeing even the shape that the projection of moving images has taken today” (p.93). It immediately reminds me of a film series, “24”, where it runs real-time: one hour in film = one hour in real life. The main difference lies in the narrative of it. While the narrative of an episode in “24” revolves around the characters and what happens at that specific time, “Empire” anchored its narrative in the building and how everything that happens around the building affected it. While buildings/the city becomes background in “24”, it clearly is the foreground and main character in “Empire”.