We don’t practice attention anymore; we’re bombarded with too many things, we have too much to do.1
—James Benning
Shot on 14 October 1888 in Leeds, England, Roundhay Garden Scene is considered the oldest surviving motion picture in the world. Consisting of 20 individual frames running a total of 2 seconds, Louis Le Prince’s film is so short and uneventful that it is easy to miss. Watching a digitally restored copy on a loop (courtesy of YouTube), however, constitutes a new and powerful experience: in this hack of the film, time extends open-endedly, with the four participants engaged in a silent, highly repetitive jig around one another. By playing on repeat as we would a favorite song, we provide Le Prince a chance to cinematically recast the physical space of the garden with the magical ability to confine and hold the participants ‘still’ within its grasp: the two women and two men are virtually trapped inside the frame of the camera, unable—or perhaps unwilling?—to escape.
© The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London. Issued under a Creative Commons Universal Zero deed.
With our 21st century attentions challenged by endless streams of information on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, as well as blockbuster films supercharged by quick cuts and loads of special effects, Roundhay Garden Scene is improbably well suited for our age: who really has the time to spend more than 1 or 2 seconds on any one piece of visual content?2
Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, an 8-hour long, black-and-white movie featuring a single shot of New York City’s Empire State Building, offers a useful counterpoint. At the time he made the film, Warhol had been experimenting with motion picture as a medium for a few years, producing experimental classics including 1963’s Sleep (a man sleeping for nearly 5½ hours) and 1964’s Blow Job (the face of a man receiving fellatio from a man who remains off screen). The artist had also begun work on his celebrated three-minute Screen Tests, in which well-known cultural personalities and creative associates, from the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp pose for the camera. With Empire, the artist gave the tallest building in the world its own (rather extended) screen test, endowing it with the kind of status and celebrity he was obsessed with. As Warhol remarked to experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas during the shooting, “The Empire State Building is a Star!”3
© The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.
Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum.
Note: Warhol’s brief reflection in the office window from which they shot the film occurs on a few occasions when he and his collaborator John Palmer loaded a new magazine in the camera.
The lack of sound and camera movement, the immobility of the architectural subject, and the general lack of activity (an occasional passing of airplane and the flash of the beacon on the Met Life Insurance Company Tower Building being notable exceptions) turn Warhol’s motion picture into something not unlike a traditional still photograph. So little happens from one moment to the next that it is nearly impossible for the audience to know for sure that they are watching a live image. Recalling the Fluxus artist Jackson Mac Low’s 1961 film script for Tree* Movie in which a single sentence about positioning a camera in front of a tree summarizes the arc of the entire film, Warhol remarked about Empire (and no doubt without a hint of sarcasm) that, “Well, it’s just easier to do than, um… painting, because the camera has a motor, and you just turn it on and you walk away…”4 At the very least, Warhol and his collaborator John Palmer needed to periodically replenish the 1,200 foot reel of their Auricon 16 mm film camera every 30 minutes or so. Surely there has to be more to capturing landscapes than properly aiming the camera and waiting… right?
In editing the film for screening, Warhol’s instinct was to slow down the live experience further still. Shot at 24 frames per second, the artist later specified that the footage be screened at 16 frames per second. It is surely hard to imagine that anyone would have the patience or find it worth their time (or the $600 rental fee) to watch the film in real time—but a version lengthened by 90 minutes? Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik, who did exactly that on the occasion of a 50th anniversary screening in early 2014, noted ruefully that no one around him had stayed for more than a few minutes. Watch Empire? Been there, done that.5
A two-minute digital scrub (also courtesy of YouTube) demonstrates that, in fact, a lot happens atmospherically over the duration of the film. Much like the looped version of Roundhay Garden Scene, this digital hack repackages Empire for our 21st century attention spans in the same way that film trailers, highlight reels, and summary recaps attempt to do. However, the real, modern equivalent of Warhol’s film is probably the decidedly pragmatic live weather cam—a source we might return to periodically in order to check the weather or traffic conditions, but for which we would have little patience to stomach for longer periods otherwise. As we continue to watch Empire, the dark silhouette of the building finds itself completely absorbed by the evening sky shortly before 9 p.m., or about one hour into the film: staring into the night as one would the screen of a dark movie theater, those few remaining bits of electrical lighting emanating from the spire and upper floor windows reach the audience courtesy of a different type of electrical bulb—the movie projector’s.
Decadent in their opulence like so many tourist postcards, the 570,000 nearly-identical individual images in Warhol’s Empire call to mind the commercial serialism of his 1962 Campbell Soup Cans and his 1964 Brillo Boxes, as well as with the 500 screen tests he compiled over the decade.6 In his own clever cinematic hack, the artist was able to slow down the impact of the movie camera to the point where some in the audience might begin to believe that the film projector is broken, unable to perform its function: is the image frozen? With the Double, Triple and Eight Elvis canvases he produced for a 1963 show at the Ferus Gallery show in Los Angeles, Warhol did the exact opposite by brilliantly replicating a single photographic still along long stretches of canvas to produce the illusion of cinematic movement. If the origins of the idea are grounded in the 19th-century French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey’s invention of chronophotography, Warhol’s message is no less explicit: is the King of Rock and Roll, one of the 20th century’s most important cultural icons and a genuine movie star in his own right, a celebrity frozen in his tracks?7
© 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Public Domain
Empire is a unique film that offers clues about the attributes of stillness, patience and attention that stand to benefit the work of landscape architects in their analysis of project sites. To this end, the Swiss landscape architect and educator Christophe Girot has long championed the use of short films as time-based methods of site exploration and site speculation by integrating “into complex representations such volatile factors as immersion, the perception of atmospheres, the role of the sound, and our own activity in space that all together form the experience of large-scale environments.”8
© Alexey Titarenko, courtesy of Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York.
A few renowned contemporary artists lead the way with hacks of their own that draw from Warhol’s celebrated film. In City of Shadows (1991–1994) for example, the Soviet-born American photographer Alexey Titarenko uses long exposures to capture several minutes of the movement of people through urban spaces in Saint Petersburg. As with Empire, the architectural elements within the frame serve to stabilize Titarenko’s images, with people passing briefly through being recorded as blurry figures, their ghostly hands clutching the railing.
By lifting a paper flap, Repton illustrates that the removal of a fence will open up a view over rolling meadows and grazing cattle.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain.
With the Extreme Ice Survey, American photographer James Balog documents the retreat of some of the largest glaciers in the world by positioning sturdy cameras programmed to capture 8,000 individual photographs a year, often under brutal weather conditions. While the cameras themselves provide views of remote sites that are inaccessible to most people, the aggregation of these images into stunning time-lapse videos provide a perspective that no single human would be able to experience in a single sitting.9 Balog’s accelerated time-lapses conjure the ingenious, liftable paper flaps that the English gardener and designer Humphry Repton superimposed over rural scenes to help visualize the impact of his proposed landscape improvements: we are a long way indeed from Le Prince’s two-second film recording.
© Corinne Vionnet Courtesy Danziger Gallery, NYC.
Finally, in Photo Opportunities (2005–present), the French photographer Corinne Vionnet opts for less remote grounds, documenting some of the most iconic tourist destinations around the world. Vionnet isn’t a traditional photographer herself in the sense that we might expect her to snap her own shots. Rather, she acts a creative agent or third party, aggregating and overlaying images posted by others to online platforms like Flickr or Instagram. The result are singular photographs that pulsate with the gazes of dozens, and perhaps even hundreds of visitors over extended periods of time: in this Vionnet is conflating the experiences of many who have all stood on the same point and consumed the exact same view.
Each in their own way, Le Prince, Warhol, Vionnet, Balog, Titarenko and many others suggest ways to question to traditional expectations associated with film and photography to produce “complex representations” that function in new and provocative ways to shape our perception of landscapes in states of change. In this, they exhort their audiences to what author and filmmaker Ariella Azoulay has characterized as a call to “stop looking […] and instead start watching…”10
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References
1 Erika Balsom, Ten Skies (Fireflies Press, 2021), 93.
2 With hilarious comments such as “I feel sorry for the people who blinked and missed the entire film” (@cinebel95), “Best movie of 1888!” (@latinoloco94), “Great plot. Loved the character development” (@Illoosion) and “I teared up when Turning Woman turned away from Walking Man” (@DJD11920), the comments section for the YouTube version of Roundhay (1.9million views) is highly entertaining and well-worth reading for itself.
3 Andy Warhol speaking to Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice, July 30, 1964, Vol. IX, No. 41.
4 “Tree* Movie:” unrealized in cinematic form until 1972, Jackson Mac Low’s script calls for any filmmaker to set up and focus a movie camera so that the [selected] tree fills most of the picture. Turn on the camera and leave it on without moving it for any number of hours; “Well, it’s just easier to do than, um…”: Blake Gopnik, Warhol (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2020), 357.
5 Blake Gopnik, “Monumental Cast, But Not Much Plot,” New York Times, January 16, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/arts/design/andy-warhols-empire-shown-in-its-entirety.html (accessed 12.31.24). Gopnik’s full set of notes on his experiences screening the film are also well-worth reading at his website WHARHOLIANA, https://warholiana.com/post/73548754534/warhols-empire-six-hours-of-footage-of-the (accessed 12.31.24).
6 “Film Calculator—Speed, Feet, Frames and Time,” https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/film- calculator/ (accessed 12.23.24).
7 Ironically, the photograph is a promotional still for his movie 1960 Flaming Star.
8 “Landscape Video: Video Analysis and Design Tool,” Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, http://girot.arch.ethz.ch/research/digital-media-perception/landscape-video-research (accessed May 24, 2016).
9 “Extreme Ice Survey – A program of Earth Vision Institute,” http://extremeicesurvey.org/, (accessed 01.07.25)
10 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), 14.
Topics in this article
Aesthetics — Andy Warhol — Art — Atmosphere / Air — Christophe Girot — Corinne Vionnet — Film & Video — Humphry Repton — James Balog — Landscape Architecture — Martin Hogue — Perception — Photography — Representation —Search other topics:
