THE SWEET NEW STYLE (THE CINEMA, THE FOSSIL FUEL ECONOMY AND ENTROPY) |
By Amos Poe

By Admin

What the heck is going on in the world? Where’s Andy Rooney when we need him? Where’s Marvin Gaye for that matter? Where’s the independent spirit — are thems creative passions gone? Will Video-On-Demand be the next big thing? Is it becoming a DIY world? Is Lena Dunham the new Spike Lee? What’s going to happen to the Gulf Coast when the next hurricane hits and all that muck and stew gushing out of the ocean floor starts covering humans like they were freaking pelicans, and poisoning the farmlands, shopping malls and Beale Street like it’s doing to the Gulf waters? Does Eisenhower seem like the only American president of the last 50 years who had the balls to tell the truth? I’m just asking, because I don’t know the answers. I have no clue.

Not to worry. At least the film business is booming. Right? James Cameron’s dystopic hero saga Avatar earns three billion dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Blackwater, Goldman Sachs, and The Carlyle Group are making dough hand-over-fist (see Carol Reed’s The Third Man). The Gulf of Mexico looks like an endless Morris Louis painting. Does the European Union look like a Monopoly game where the bank prints new money every turn, every roll of the dice, before the board tips over? General Motors, not too long ago, America’s biggest Hummer building company is in receivership. There are wars on terror, border wars, drug wars, oil wars, religious wars, ethnic cleansing wars everywhere you look. The President of the United States goes on TV and says lets pray this madness stops. Pray is right. The Prime Minister of Italy, and its biggest media owner, says he can’t do his job if there’s a constitution, so the Italian Parliament basically agrees to get rid of it. The wealthiest man in the world is a former KGB agent turned Stalinist-capitalist. I mean, where the heck are we? We’re certainly not in Harvey Weinstein’s Kansas anymore.

And by “we,” I mean us, ‘independent’ filmmakers.

At the turn of the last century a bunch of great ideas … Read the rest

AMOS POE’S WHITE ALBUM

By Scott Macaulay

I thought I knew Amos Poe’s first film, but after reading his account of the early days of his career as well as Lower East Side film in general, it turns out that I didn’t. From his piece at Truly Free Film:

My first Super 8 film, was a series of shorts made to the Beatles “White” album. I loved that record and came up with short stories or ideas for each song. My friends helped and “acted” in these films. With ”Rocky Racoon” I did single-frame animation, for “Dear Prudence”, I managed to convince the most beautiful girl in Buffalo – who wouldn’t otherwise have given me the time of day, let alone come out to play – to jump naked out of an abandoned hay-loft on a deserted farm and run through an oat field in slow-motion. I then spliced all these bits together onto a 400 foot reel – there were two, because it’s a double-album – and had a premiere at a bar across the street from my house on Main and Ferry. For sound, my Nizo Super 8 was silent, I had to time the drop of the needle on the record at exactly the right moment as I hit the switch on the projector – otherwise I’d lose “synch”! Ha ! We passed the hat around, and as I recall, I came away with $47.50, not bad. Paid for a third of the film’s cost in one night.

Check out the rest — it’s a good read, encapsulating not only a tale of early film entrepreneurship in Flatbush but also notes on Poe’s latest, La Commedia, for which he recently launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, and a call to arms for us to reinvent our cinema with the new tools we now have.

… Read the rest