Empire and Repetition

I found Hal Foster's discussion of repetition, particularly in Andy Warhol's work, particularly interesting and enlightening. On page 131, he quotes Warhol saying, "I like boring things...I wand it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel." As I was watching Warhol's "Empire", I was wondering what would possess someone to make an eight hour long film of the same thing, barely changing. I mean, I know Warhol was kind of a weirdo, but still? After watching for a while, a trance-like quality starts to come from the film, and it feels like you aren't seeing the Empire State Building anymore, but rather the shapes and shadows that make up the building. As Warhol says, "if you enter it totally, you might expose it; that is, you might reveal its automatism, even its autism, through your own excessive example" (131). And Empire is certainly an excessive example. Seeing the same static image (with a few changes from the film medium itself) for so long both destroys and imparts meaning to it.

As I said, the Empire State Building seems to go away in the film and deteriorate into the sum of its parts. Rather than a beacon of capitalism and consumerist New York, it becomes an ethereal, almost peaceful image after being viewed for a while. So here is Warhol's idea of emptying the object of meaning. But on the other hand, the essence of the building also seems to emerge because of the aggressive repetition. It can be said that you are seeing the edifice for "what it really is," instead of just its facade. That would negate the Warholian idea of negating trauma through repetition. Having only the one image on the screen to look at for so long, you enter a sort of contemplative state. "What is he trying to prove with this? What am I supposed to be seeing? Why focus on this for so long?" You turn your gaze back on yourself, and question what the film says about you and your values. The unmoving, unchanging object of the film facilitates reflection on the self and its relationship with the image presented to it. So Empire is an example of the two polar results of exact repetition- enhancement of meaning and neutralization of it.