Apart from Mekas's articles in "The Village Voice", the only other extended discussion of the film around the time of its release is in two articles in "Film Culture", a journal of experimental cinema that Mekas and his brother published. Gregory Battcock, a critic who was part of Warhol's circle and appears in several of his films, connected the film with other works by Warhol in terms of its focus on a subject the viewer already generally knows. He argued this left space to emphasize other issues, particularly the physical medium of film, and the artistic use of long duration as a way of concentrating attention on these qualities. Battcock also observed that "Empire" had quickly become a classic of the avant garde and promised to have great, if unpredictable influence on the development of film. In a later issue of "Film Culture", John Bernard Myers, the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and a notable New York City cultural figure, responded to Battcock's article, dismissing the "simplistic concept" of the idea of time as a subject of film, observing, "If I were the camera, I would faint with boredom, staring that long at one thing..."