Empire II

Director: Amos Poe

2007 / 180min / Digital

Shot over the course of a year from the window of its director’s Manhattan apartment, Empire II is Poe’s rejoinder, more than 40 years later, to Andy Warhol’s minimalist masterpiece of 1965, which offers an eight-hour static view of the Empire State Building. Rather than a record of time mummified, as in Warhol’s shot-on-film picture, Poe offers a dynamic city symphony that could only be achieved with new digital tools, a rich mosaic of densely overlapped images, pulsing zooms, and slashing pans, all accompanied by a soundtrack in which an awesome, eclectic array of needle drops jostle alongside the clangorous musique concrète of urban living, combining to make a stirring 21st-century city symphony.

Part of Amos Poe and No Wave Cinema