Description:

In 2023, the celebrated performance and multimedia artist Sandra Binion uncovered a reel of forgotten super-8 film in a shopping bag while exploring her voluminous archives in advance of a career retrospective in Chicago. Working with the Chicago Film Archives and the Experimental Sound Studio, Binion restored the 1978 film, made in collaboration with the influential NYC independent filmmaker Amos Poe and oboist Joel Marangella. Titled ASCENDING/DESCENDING, the film captures a spontaneous dance performance made on a Manhattan fire escape. In celebration of the recent acquisition of Binion’s archive by Northwestern’s Special Collections, Block Cinema presents this captivating experiment, finally seeing the light of day after 45 years, along with a rare screening of Poe’s astonishing feature, THE FOREIGNER, made the same year. 

A film forged in the hotbed of New York’s punk and No Wave scenes, THE FOREIGNER is nevertheless the essence of cool: an arch, starkly photographed, first-take-best-take noir riff about a mysterious European traveler (Eric Mitchell) being stalked across the city by spies, punks, and miscreants. While contemptuous of narrative conventions, THE FOREIGNER is thrillingly cinematic in its exploration of movement and stasis in urban space, and teems with screen presence both human and architectural. Taking inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE and lending inspiration in turn to a young Jim Jarmusch among others, Poe’s film today stands as both a singular achievement in low-budget independent filmmaking and a collective portrait of the 1970s New York underground at its apex. 

The screening will feature a recorded introduction by Amos Poe and a post-screening discussion with artist Sandra Binion.

FILMS SCREENED: 
ASCENDING/DESCENDING (Sandra Binion and Amos Poe, 1978/2024, 11 min, color, sound, super-8-to-digital)

THE FOREIGNER (Amos Poe, 1978, 90 min, B&W, sound, 16mm-to-digital)

About the speakers:
SANDRA BINION is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often takes the form of multimedia installations based on literary or historical themes and references. Her work encompasses performances, installations, process-based artworks, photographs, and paintings that embrace a choreography of the everyday. She has exhibited and performed in the US, Europe, and Japan at venues including the Musée d’Orsay Paris, Kyoto City University of the Arts, Maison de George Sand, Musée Flaubert Rouen, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Kunstraum Stuttgart, Institut Unzeit Berlin, and many others.

​​AMOS POE is a filmmaker, writer, producer, and artist. Poe is a leading figure of the No Wave Cinema movement (1975-85) that emerged from the East Village music and art scene and included Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, Vivienne Dick, John Lurie, and Charlie Ahearn and others. His 1976, collaboration with Ivan Kral, THE BLANK GENERATION chronicled the seminal performances of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Wayne County, etc. Other noted works of the time include Poe’s UNMADE BEDS (1976), an homage to Godard’s “Breathless” and the French New Wave, and THE FOREIGNER (1978), starring Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor, Duncan Hannah and Debbie Harry. Poe’s most recent work, “A Walk in the Park” opened the 2012 Rome International Film Festival and debuted at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in NYC. Poe’s films regularly screen in the US and abroad including at institutions such as The New Museum, MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, MoCA, Beaubourg in Paris among others. An archive of Poe’s writings and other works is housed at The Fales Library in New York. Poe was born in Tel Aviv, in 1949 and emigrated to the US with his family in 1958. He currently lives and works in New York City.