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Blank City

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : BLANK CITY tells the long-overdue tale of the motley crew of renegade filmmakers that emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous period of New York History. It’s a fascinating look at the way this misfit cinema used the deserted , bombed-out Lower East Side landscapes to craft daring works that would go on to profoundly influence Independent Film today.

Opened April 6, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 36 min.

 

Interview with a pioneer independent filmmaker Amos Poe, Director Celine Danhier

 

(Q): Why do you think a lot of people aren't aware of this history? Do you think that it's had its proper due and is that's why you decided to make a movie, because you felt people weren't fully aware of what happened here and the word needed to be given an umbrella or overview?
 
(Celine Danhier): Yes, when I was living in France and when I saw this festival in Paris about new wave films I was like oh my god, I don't know very well the new wave films. So I started to make some research from France and from France it was quite difficult, so I was like okay, I'm going to move to New York and it's going to be easier. But even in New York when I moved to New York it was not so easy to find the films. And at the beginning it was great because you had Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place, so you could find some VHS or some bootleg, but now it's closed.
 
(Q) : Do you feel a little frustrated that it ended up that way? I don't know what happened with distribution. How was it that it was lost until this film sort of consolidates it? What do you think was the problem? Just people weren't that organized, weren't that businesslike?
 
(Amos Poe): Yeah, I think it's all those things probably. Some things are meant to be esoteric or underground or not to be found, but she found. I think the thing that turned me on to it was how committed Celine was to try to give it a framework. I mean I haven't seen the latest cut, but what I saw in Tribeca I thought she did a really great job.
 
(Q) : Were there a lot of people there that you had lost touch with that you got back in touch with, or have you guys been consistently more or less in touch with each other?
 
(Amos Poe): Well no, I met Celine when you called me I guess.
 
(Celine Danhier): Yeah, it was my second interviews. I moved to New York, I think I moved to New York in like December, and I started to shoot.
 
(Amos Poe): Of what year?
 
(Celine Danhier): Of 2006. And I think I started to shoot like at the end of February and I think I got in touch with you in March.
 
(Q) : I actually meant with the people that are the subjects of the film.
 
(Amos Poe) : I've been pretty much consistently in touch with Debbie and Jim. John infrequently because he's sort of burrowed himself a little bit, but every once in a while. Eric every once in a while. I wouldn't say consistently, but here and there.
  
(Q) : Was the first movie you had like a baby where you're actually making a film? Talk about the hardship of going through that.
 
(Amos Poe): It's so long ago. She's now almost 35 and has two children of her own.

(Amos Poe) : It's a long time.

(Q) : I knew her when she was a baby.
 
(Amos Poe) : And she's a very successful business woman and a very happy person, which is amazing to me. I was married, I was working a couple of jobs in distribution, and I was also saving money to make films by being a superintendent of a building on 15th Street. Two buildings actually. It was a way not to pay rent. And in 1976, "Blank Generation" , just as I was sort of taking this leap of dreaming, imagination, or whatever, to try to reinvent Goddard or something like that, my daughter was born. And then I took two weeks off to shoot "Unmade Beds," and it was my vacation from my distribution job. But the last month at the job I had a really, really, really great assistant who sort of covered for me so I could concentrate on the film, because I was kind of doing it all myself.

While I was shooting the owner of the company came to New York and saw my desk, which basically I left with all the stuff of my own work, not the company's work, and so when I came back I found out I was fired. And then very soon after that I was also fired from my job as a superintendent. And I had just spent all our savings on the film, so we had like no money. And then my wife had a nervous breakdown, a post-partum nervous breakdown, and she was admitted to Beth Israel hospital and was there for a couple of months, for more than a couple of months actually, maybe like four months. And it was very, very difficult to both edit the film, finish the film, take care of the baby, take care of the wife.

I don't even know how I got through it, but one of the things was that I was so obsessed that somehow even the worst of the worst conditions there was one thing that was clear, even when everything else was confused. There were actually two things that were clear; one was to take care of Emily, and the other one was to finish the film. The New York hospital system was so bad that basically the realization came that all they were really doing was giving her Thorazine or something.

They were just warehousing people, they weren't treating them. So eventually I was able to get her out and get her to a hospital upstate near where her family was from, which was a little better. And she would come down every once in a while. Anyway, it was a bad time. And then "Unmade Beds" premiered and nobody showed up. It was like eight people came to the opening which was at like City College on 42nd Street. On the one hand it was like okay, it means I have to make another film.
 
(Q) : Of course those days without the internet you couldn't do a viral promotion or something.
 
(Amos Poe) : It wasn't that. I wasn't trying to promote it to a public really. I was trying to get these people to see it, just my friends to see it.
 
(Q) : Some of the movies actually had a video release in Japan.
 
(Amos Poe) : There was actually a guy whose name I forget right now. He's passed away since, but this guy was a Japanese guy who knew about "Blank Generation" and was a huge punk fan somehow. And from about 1979 to like 1985 maybe, '86 even, every year in like January I would get a letter in the mail from him on a typewriter asking me was "Blank Generation" available for the Japanese market? And if it was, how much advance would it be and how much would a print cost? And I would write back and say yes it's available, I think it would be like $5,000 and $500 for a print or something like that. Then I wouldn't here from him until the following January.

And this went on year after year after year until like 1985 or something like that. Again in January the letter came, I said yes it's still available, and I answered him every year, and about one month later a check arrived and he finally bought it. I don't even know what he did with it exactly. I think he died in the late '90s, mid '90s or something. I never really stayed that much in touch with him afterwards. Every once in a while he would write me or I would write him. In Japan it was actually the best place for the film.
 
(Q) : Weren't there a number of films that actually found audiences initially or very early on in Japan?
 
(Amos Poe) : Jim's films.
 
(Q) : Jim's films were mostly produced by someone Japanese.
 
(Amos Poe) : Yes, JVC.
 
(Celine Danhier): And it's funny because one of the DPs is from Japan, Ryo Murakami, and so Ryo when I met him at the beginning he was like "Yes, I know everything from the scene." He was living in Japan and he told me that all the films and the new wave culture was very important.
 
(Q) : It's funny because these films had a much bigger impact internationally than they did in the States. Why do you think that is and what do you think tied all the films together and why is it that I think Europe and Japan appreciated it and understood it? Was it that they were outside the culture so they found this as a fascinating look inside the culture? It took a long while to get Americans.
 
(Amos Poe) : Americans have never been interested in their own culture. They’re just too dumb. It’s really true; they’re not aware.
 
(Celine Danhier) : But even now it’s too difficult for them, but in France it’s too difficult in France and in Europe.
 
(Amos Poe) : It’s historical too. The Beat generation was not really seen here much of anything. Much bigger in Europe and other places than here. A lot of bands tour a lot more outside the country. America is kind of like pop. If you’re not a franchise, if you’re not McDonald’s. It’s like what they’ve done to Times Square. They’ve filled it with Applebee’s and McDonald’s so people came come here and have what they have at home. It’s like why that?
 
(Q) : Or it’s taken this many years to get an appreciation for something that they could have had an appreciation for when it was happening.
 
(Amos Poe) : I’m not sure we even necessarily had a certain appreciation for it. We have a historical context for it now. But you just make the stuff and see where it lands.
 
(Q) : When you were making it and when you were putting the film together did you see the consistent themes of all the films or was it interesting to see where they diverged from each other? Is that something that you looked at as well and you noticed in seeing the film bringing together everybody reminding you? Or did you feel you saw it at the time when the films were being made?
 
(Celine Danhier): What for me was very inspiring and interesting it’s like they all encapsulate the analogy of New York at that time. But they’re all different because you have some shot in black and white, some in color, some long, some short, so they’re all different.
 
(Q) : And what did you feel? In seeing everybody being brought together did you see certain consistent themes and are you glad it’s there or were you a bit surprised thinking about the diversity, you didn’t realize how either close or different all the people were? Because there were some consistent things, I think, bringing everybody together.
 
(Amos Poe) : Which were?
 
(Q) : Well I think the sense of irony. Most of these films their point of view is not very sentimentalist. I think most of the filmmakers used a sense of irony in a lot of ways. I also think there was a lot of energy there that was anarchic. A lot of them were very anarchic in their spirit. And also lots of experimentation with narrative and stuff.
 
(Celine Danhier) : And a lot were blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
 
(Q) : Which was kind of like our lives at the time. I was doing it when I was writing about rock music and stuff like that. That’s what I did at the time. But I want to hear you guys talk about it.
 
(Amos Poe) : I think the energy is pretty consistent and I think the innocence. And I don’t know if it’s the right word for it, but unprofessionalism.
 
(Q) : Or anti-professionalism.
 
(Amos Poe) : Or anti-professionalism. For me personally I didn’t even know how to make a film. That didn’t stop me from making them. I think that’s key too, when an artist is intrigued by the form without having mastered it. Because it takes years to master it, and not necessarily that you ever do. But that also doesn’t mean that the best quality is done by the masters. Sometimes the inspirational thing overwhelms the craft. There are some people who can do both.One could say that Orson Wells’ “Citizen Cane” was an amateur film because he had never made a film before, so it was his first film. Did he ever top it? I’m not sure. There are some people who do.  

(Celine Danhier) : I think it’s true at that time the energy and the creativity had no boundaries. And New York was very fertile ground so it’s true you can shoot everywhere and even if you don’t have any skills it doesn’t matter because basically you just had the idea, you just take the camera and just shoot.
 
(Amos Poe) : And you get interesting people or people who intrigue you in some way in front of the camera, which comes from for me at least from Warhol with the superstars or Cassavetes with his close friends or his group of people that he’s intimate with and can converse with or spend time with or whatever. It’s like what your eye or your ear. Some people you can listen to for hours, it doesn’t matter what they say because their voice sounds so good to you, and some people you can’t listen to for like five minutes. You don’t have control over that per se, it’s just what happens.
 
(Celine Danhier) : But the collaboration was very intense as well. A lot of filmmakers started the collaboration with experimental musicians or vanguard artists, and from that you create daring things.
 
(Amos Poe) : Right. Like you would be someone at CBGB’s. So you would see Blondie and you’d kind of go wow, she’s a natural on camera, I just want to film her.
 
(Q) : Or like John.
 
(Amos Poe) : Yeah, exactly.
 
(Q) : Now how about for you? This is your first so you were also coming in as a kind of naïve, innocent, experimental, didn't know what the hell you're doing but you're still making a film film.
 
(Celine Danhier) : Very, very naïve, yeah. Very like oh, I'm going to move to New York and I'm going to make this documentary.
 
(Amos Poe) : That was the charm of it really.
 
(Celine Danhier) : Yeah, but you know what was great was first I was not by myself. We were like two or three with this project, so we're like together. But it's true you know, we at first not naïve, because we knew exactly what we wanted to do and we knew how we were going to do it, but perhaps I didn't think about all the struggle that I will have to do during shooting "Blank City," because for us New York was a very landscape. New York today is a very, very expensive place; you have to hustle just a little bit I think.
 
(Q) : A little too bourgeoisie for its own good.
 
(Q) : Did you get any directional tips from those masters?
 
(Celine Danhier) : I tried to keep the same DIY spirit and just try to make it happen, even if I didn't have a lot of things, even if I didn't direct anything before. When I started I didn't have any money so I had another job and I had to shoot at night and during the weekend.
 
(Q) : Think about the difference though in the tools. At least you had digital tools. Think about what people had to shoot with back then and editing and trying to get stuff done and they'd lose pieces of film or god knows what.
 
(Amos Poe) : I just shot something in Super 8 again and I love it. It's like rediscovering something and it's like oh my god, I love that look. The digital thing makes it easier, but at the same time when we shot "Blank Generation" it was really funny because people would look at me with the 16mm camera that I had and they would go "Is that a silent camera?" and I would go "Yeah." And they would go "You're shooting a band with a silent camera?

Are you retarded?" And it didn't occur to me in that way. Or people would say "Listen, just put that away. In a week or two I have this camera with sound." In a week or two? A week or two? What's a week or two? Everything is the way it's supposed to be, ultimately. I like shooting bands with silent cameras; I like to have a kind of a tension between the sound and the image.
 
(Q) : Did you put another band's music to it?
 
(Amos Poe) : No, we put the same band. I think one of the reasons "Blank Generation" for whatever it does work for is that the sound and the image are not and it's not a documentary per se. It's a document of sorts or it's a work of art of some sort. I was never out to be a documentarian, per se, so I don't think it would have helped to have sync sound actually, looking back. Now when we distributed it we had some problems because I was working in distribution and there was a midnight circuit in those days, "Pink Flamingos," "Sex Madness," "Reefer Madness," all these films, and so I managed to convince the theater owners in the circuit to book "Blank Generation." It was like the Elgin and different cities; Toronto had one, Cleveland had one.

Maybe like 30 or 40 cities had certain theaters that had midnight screenings, and I managed to convince them to book it. I think we only had one print or two prints maybe, so I managed to ship it out Tuesday and they got it on Thursday, they showed it on Friday and Saturday nights and then they sent it back on Monday and I managed to clean it and get it out again. It was a 16mm print.

But every Monday when I would talk to the theater owner they would go "Yeah, we got 20 people on Friday and we got 26 on Saturday," I'd go "Well at least Saturday went up 30% or something," and he goes "Yeah, but 15 people wanted their money back because it wasn't in sync." So the expectation of a $40 check came back as an $18 check or something like that.
 
(Q) : Where is the print now? Did you get it preserved?
 
(Amos Poe) : It's here.
 
(Q) : It's processed? You made more copies eventually? No?

(Amos Poe) : No, we actually lost the negative, but we did make a digi-master. So it only exists digitally now. I mean there are prints by they're old and they're fried.
 
(Q) : Have you gone to any of the archival places to restore it and fix it and keep it?
 
(Amos Poe) : Not yet.
 
 (Celine Danhier): I think the Anthology Film Archives are restoring some, yes.
 
(Amos Poe) : Oh yeah, right. That's true.
 
(Q) : You initially started off as a photographer and then moved on to film. There are some directors that do a different job previously. Was there a part of photography and seeing through the lenses that inspired filmmaking?
 
(Amos Poe): Yeah. When I was 13 or so my father gave me as a present his camera and I started being fascinated by it. We built a little darkroom in the basement of the house and I had all these books. There were no classes about photography there. And then there were some kids in the school who were into it. I was mostly a jock; I was a baseball player. I went to college on a baseball scholarship.

(Q) : What position did you play?
 
(Amos Poe) : I pitched. I played Ohio University.
 
(Q) : Really, you were in Ohio? That's where I'm from; I'm from Cincinnati.
 
(Amos Poe) : This was Athens. My interest was sports, but photography was definitely the other. I liked poetry and music was a big thing. Music was actually the biggest thing, but I really dug photography as something. I made really weird stuff. But the thing that really intrigued me the most, because it was the Vietnam era, was to be a war photographer. To me that was like being in the action and the adrenaline going. I was also a competitive downhill skier, so the adrenaline I really needed that. To me that was the juice. And I was against the war because I was born in Asia and I thought the war was against Asians, that was my thinking, so I hated the war.

I couldn't go there even as a photographer but I really wanted to go there because it looked so exciting. And then in 1968 I had been kicked out of college and I had some money left over from my scholarship so I went to England actually and rented a little Triumph sports car and drove all around Europe taking photographs and stuff. And then I eventually ended up visiting my father's family in Czechoslovakia in August and got caught in there when the Russians invaded in '68 in August.

The night that it happened I also happened to have taken some mescaline, so I was tripping too. I was up all night photographing it and I had amazing strobe lights and I had a bunch of cameras at the time, I lot of film. And when I got out I actually sold those photographs to Time Life, and when I came back to the States I was so bored of photography because I had done the thing that I most wanted to do, which was to be in the action and people being shot and tanks and running around the streets. It was like the high point of my life, nothing was ever going to top this. And selling it to Time Life, and "Look" magazine or "Life" magazine was like the epitome of that kind of journalism. I was lost.

I wasn't playing baseball anymore, photography was boring, I didn't know what to do. I was like 19 years old and everything was over; there was nothing left to do. What was I going to do? And I met this guy, Rick Silverman, who was an engineering student in Buffalo, and what he would do, because he was a mechanical, electrical engineer, so he would buy whatever contraption. So let's say he wanted to see how this was built, so he would buy two of these and he would leave one here and he would take the other one and he would take it apart so he could see how everything worked. And then he would put it back together, but if he didn't understand how to put it together he had the other one to look at.

So what he had on his table that night was a Neso super 8 camera, and he had it taken apart and the other one was sitting there. So I came into his house and we lit a joint and I said "Hey, Rick, what the heck is this?" He said "It's a super 8 camera." I go "What do you do with that?" He goes "You can make movies." So I picked it up in my hand and it was like falling in love. Instant love. And instant gratification too. So suddenly the photography thing, because I was so over that, became motion, and then I started to make all these little what amounted to music videos, which was I would just listen to some music, get an idea for the visual, and get my friends to act in it and do whatever, and then I would show them in bars. Across the street from my house was this great bar called Maxell's and I would put the films together.
 
(Q) : Where was your house at the time?
 
(Amos Poe) : It was in Buffalo on Main Street.
 
(Q) : Oh yeah that strip where it was that little rock and roll scene?
 
(Amos Poe) : No, that's to the West Side. This is where the black ghetto and the white meet.
 
(Celine Danhier): I've never been to Buffalo.
 
(Amos Poe) : It's an insane place. But there were a few sort of hipsters, not many. But what was great was I would bring my projector and there was a record player, and I knew when to drop the needle and turn the projector on so it would be in sync.
 
(Celine Danhier) : What was funny, I met a lot of people, and during the interviews some people were talking about Freddy the Fence. You know Freddy the Fence, he had this place on Houston and you could buy some super 8 cameras for very cheap? And some people told me it was just a story, it didn't exist.
 
(Q) : I don't remember hearing that. You should make your next movie about Freddy the Fence, right?
 
(Celine Danhier) : I guess.
 
(Q) : James Nares told you that?
 
(Celine Danhier) : Jim Jarmusch.
 
(Amos Poe) : I don't know. I've never heard of it before.
 
(Q) : But what's interesting that both of you made a point about. Actually, I want to hear about your romance with filmmaking and how that got started, but before we do that what's interesting is how much everybody, like Nares is a painter and also made film, and Jarmusch was a rock musician. I think it's great to see somebody really in depth tracking this down. Where did your love for making movies and then obviously connecting to this larger history come from?
 
(Celine Danhier) : I was very into music. When I was living in Paris I was listening to a lot of bands like Blondie. So I saw this film and I knew the new wave music but I didn't know very well the new wave films. So I Googled, I went to Google. Even on Wikipedia you don't have a lot of things regarding the new wave film scene. I was very surprised by that and I was like okay, we're going to do some research, first in France and then I moved to New York, and I started like that.

At the beginning I had the idea of documenting the new wave cinema and I didn't know all the films or all the people. You met someone and so the person was like "Did you see that?" and sometimes you're like "Yes," and sometimes you're like "No, I don't know this film." We had to track down some people or films and we took like two years or three years to find everybody and the films.

(Q) : It's interesting what you were able to collect together. We knew of people as a collective whole, but to have someone that kind of put it all together it's like having a chart. It's really nice to sort of see it all. When does the movie open?
 
(Celine Danhier): It's going to open in one week, April 6th. So the film is going to open in New York on April 6th. April 5th we're going to do a party. And we're going to open in LA, Boston, DC, Chicago; a couple of different cities.
 
(Q) : So now you're going to have to have people documenting you and your events and your openings.
 
(Amos Poe) : I was talking to Jarmusch about it. We should do a film about Celine.
 
(Q) : Yeah, I think so. I think you should play a character in the film. Maybe yourself, but as a character.
 
(Celine Danhier) : At the beginning I was not pessimistic but I was like nobody's going to say yes because nobody knows me, even with my accent.
 
(Amos Poe) : What accent? She actually lives in Brooklyn, she's from Brooklyn.
 
(Q) : Are you living in Brooklyn now?
 
(Celine Danhier) : No, I moved. I moved to the Financial District.
 
(Q) : Back then there were a lot of guys or people that looked like the people in "Midnight Cowboy." It's really interesting the characters there, people in the street, people you met. Did you meet those kind of "Midnight Cowboy" kind of characters?
 
(Q) : That was every night, all the time.
 
(Amos Poe) : Pretty much. One of the questions you always get is "Is it better now or then?" or "How has it changed?" I think the big thing is just real estate. That's the biggest thing in New York. We were able to have apartments or lofts for very little and it allowed us a little bit of freedom.
 
(Q) : How about celebrity culture right now? It's almost like there's no privacy going on.

(Amos Poe) : I think privacy is the new celebrity. It's like what Andy Warhol did for fame now you have to do it for privacy. It's like flipped. I think the blogs, the media, the internet, world wide web, all that. But that's looking at it from one perspective. I kind of look at the world from another perspective. I'm a big reader of history books and biographies and things like that. We're living like present history. Japan is the metaphor right now for the whole world. Japan is like the center of the world in a way, metaphorically, because if three weeks ago Thursday right before the earthquake, if you would have gone to Hollywood and pitched a story and go "Okay, here's the movie; an earthquake happens, then a tsunami wipes away thousands, and then nuclear reactor, not one but four meltdown."

They would say "That's over the top. Nobody will buy that." So the reality right now is sort of like celebrities more than authentic humanity. It's trying to sell celebrity because the reality is so ridiculous, is so bad. So it's an escape. And governments, whether it's Libya or Tunisia or Algeria or Yemen, I watch things online about Japanese people talking about their own government and they're almost embarrassed. So many people say "Well the thing is I just don't know what to believe because I certainly don't believe the government." So the people put there supposedly to sort of organize things essentially are just on their own trip.
 
(Q) : But I think one of the things Nobu is drawing attention to is that when people made these films they weren't doing them to be celebrities or personalities. I mean they were doing them to be personalities in terms of their own creativity and part of the community, but they didn't think about it as you can get this global attention and make yourself into this character. And I think that's one of the charms of the movies in a way.
 
(Amos Poe) : We were all romanticizing bohemianism.
 
(Celine Danhier) : And the landscape was very, very different than today's.
 
(Amos Poe) : It was actually the beginning of what's going on today. The way I look at it is that 1971, '72 from an energy point of view was the big moment in America where we reached peak oil and the fossil fuel era was over in American, we just didn't realize it. New York was a kind of a sewer for that whole thing because New York was bankrupt, so this kind of romanticized bohemianism could really flourish in that environment. And also mainstream celebrity culture was so out of touch, like who gave a shit? Like who cared if blah blah blah…
 
(Q) : Elizabeth Taylor, for example.
 
(Amos Poe) : In that time we didn't care about Elizabeth Taylor because it really out of touch with our reality. That's what I'm saying. What I get from watching Japanese people talk about their government is that their government is out of touch with their reality. They're saying "Well if you just move 8km that way you won't get radiated." Dude, what are you crazy? There's no wall at 8km. Turn that shit off. "Oh we can't." What do you mean you can't? "Oh we built this thing on an earthquake line and now we can't figure out where the off button is." You mean you made and built this thing without an off button? Why? And that's the world; there is no off button.

End.