Amos Poe — who co-directed OG punk film The Blank Generation and helped give birth to the film branch of No Wave — died on Christmas Day. He was 76. Poe had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2022. His wife, writer Claudia Summers, announced his death on Instagram. Commenters sending condolences included Jim Jarmusch, Debi Mazar, and Kim Gordon, who wrote “some people die magnificently.”
Poe began his filmmaking career in 1970’s New York. He co-directed The Blank Generation with Patti Smith Group member Ivan Král. The film featured performances from Richard Hell (hence the title), Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and more. It also features now-defunct NY punk institutions like CBGBs and the original Max’s Kansas City. The Blank Generation was on both Rolling Stone’s 25 Greatest Punk Rock Movies of All Time and Vulture’s 101 Best New York City Movies.
Poe was closely associated with the No Wave and Remodernist film movements. “I guess remodernist is the next variation of post-modernist, which is to take something that was in the culture before and then turn it into something else, like taking it out of context,” Poe said in 2008, discussing his film Empire II, which references Andy Warhol’s 8-hour film Empire. “I was using Warhol as a kind of soup can.” Other filmic works of Poe’s include 1981’s Subway Riders (starring John Lurie and Cookie Mueller), The Foreigner, and public access show TV Party. “I view my films a lot of times in a state of…semi-consciousness,” Poe said in 1981. “When I see the old films, it’s like a recurring dream or ghosts in a familiar landscape that haunt me.”
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Poe married his partner Claudia Summers in 2019. On her Instagram, Summers recalled when they got engaged. “Afterwards Amos and I walked home and I talked to my mother on the phone. Her exact quote: I never thought you’d get married for real. Neither had I,” she wrote. “Marrying Amos was the best thing I ever did.”
