Why did Andy Warhol make an eight-hour movie in which nothing happened?
In Charlie Kaufman’s meta-movie Adaptation, Nicholas Cage plays a tired and stressed Charlie Kaufman, pulling his hair out trying to write a movie. He sits at his desk and ponders the art of creativity, stressing out over how he could possibly write a movie that accurately portrays the real world. There are no car chases, no excitement, just life going by as we see it.
“Sir, what if the writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens,” he asks, “Where people don’t change. They don’t have epiphanies; they struggle and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world.”
The writer he speaks to doesn’t agree with Cage’s real-world assessment. “The real fucking world?” He asks before reeling off the conflict that happens every second of every day, which could form the foundation of the story.
He talks about war, falling in and out of love, losing friends, losing oneself, and all of the different afflictions and battles that seem to plague every waking moment. “If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life,” he concludes.
Though the creative mind constantly looks for a story in everyday life, the fact is that Nicholas Cage’s character is right. We watch movies and read books where there is conflict, where people change, and characters have arcs, but a lot of the time, in life, things are stale, people don’t change, and there’s not a lot to learn from the circumstances of a passing 24 hours.
Andy Warhol was an artist known for bright colours and flamboyancy; however, when it came to his 1964 film Empire, he strayed very far away from this brand identity. Instead of going for bright colours, he opted for black and white, and instead of showing the viewer something they struggled to take their eyeline away from, he showed something mundane and everyday (for the people of New York, at least).
The film is simple. Eight hours of black and white footage showing the Empire State Building protruding Manhattan smog. Nothing happens in the eight hours except that the evening turns to night and the night turns to day. There is no dialogue, no story, no nothing. The lights on the top of the Empire State Building turn on and off depending on how dark it is, but that’s the closest you will get to any form of shift in direction.
Andy Warhol’s rationale for making the film is similar to Nicholas Cage’s motivation in Adaptation in that he wanted to create a piece of art that perfectly reflects everyday life. He doesn’t show anything exciting or remotely note-worthy. The only thing that the viewer is subject to is the only guarantee in life: while nothing happens and the scene is devoid of excitement, time still passes. And that is captured beautifully.
