Amos Poe Update

Amos Poe, director of No Wave/post punk film classics such as THE FOREIGNER and NIGHT LUNCH as well as the more recent Warhol homage EMPIRE II, will see a busy fall.

His latest film La COMMEDIA di Amos Poe raised $20,000 for post production completion (target was $12,000) on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. La COMMEDIA di Amos Poe, a contemporary re-telling of Dante’s Divine Comedy with references to photographer/proto-cinema pioneer Eadward Muybridge, will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival in late September. (more…)

NO WAVE - Film Retrospective at the Film Museum Vienna

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Berlinale: BLANK CITY - the New York No Wave film scene revisited

Céline Danhier’s documentary BLANK CITY uncovers amazing footage of Super 8 and 16mm film gems made in the late 1970s and early 1980s in downtown (Lower Eastside) New York. At that time, New York City was practically bankrupt (the federal government refused a bailout, somewhat comparable to the German Federal Court denying Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s request for financial aid) and in a state of urban decay and social strife. From this despair emerged a highly creative scene of filmmakers, musicians and artists - art as the only way out? (more…)

Original inspiration of Poe’s EMPIRE II - Warhol’s “Empire” playing Club Transmediale

Watch the inspiration of Amos Poe’s Warhol homage EMPIRE II at Club Transmediale:

“Groupshow presents an 8-hour performance with Andy Warhol’s film ‘Empire’, a marathon event which dissolves into a hybrid of audiovisual installation and concert. Here, improvisation as a process-based art form meets a cinematic study of time unfolding. The single-shot recording of New York’s Empire State Building was filmed on the night of July 25th, 1964, from 20:06 pm to 2:42 am. Warhol slowed down the number of frames per minute, giving the film a length of 8 hours and 6 min. ‘Groupshow with Empire’ is part of the ‘Warhol Series’ commissioned by the Unsound 2008 festival, a series of works giving new musical settings to Warhol films.” (more…)

we have to change our conception of what counts as an event

David Bordwell about Amos Poe´s EMPIRE II on davidbordwell.net, Part 2

When the weather changes, the light does too. Raindrops become not only a pebbly surface on the windows but tiny filters. As with Warhol’s films, we have to change our conception of what counts as an event. Slight differences of framing and texture become visual epiphanies. Rain can be gray-green, and snow can go pale red. At times, the steeple clock face in the lower right becomes an imperturbable timekeeper, a sort of pictorial timecode, reminiscent of the clock in the corner of the shots of Robert Nelson’s Bleu Shut.

FILM: EMPIRE II