In a November 1992 New Yorker essay on Manhattan's East Village art scene and the corporate cooption of cool, writer Adam Gopnik decried "the myth of endless, successive Bohemias" - but damned if it hadn't seemed for the longest time that there was no end to the downtown avant garde. Fourteen years earlier, the release of Amos Poe's independent feature The Foreigner (1978) had given heart and purpose to a new generation of New York DIY artists, musicians, and filmmakers, among them James Nares (Rome '78, 1978), Bette Gordon (Variety, 1983), Lizzie Borden (Born in Flames, 1983), Eric Mitchell (Underground USA, 1980), Beth and Scott B (Vortex, 1982), and Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984) while spawning a movement deemed the spawn of Warhol. Branded "No Wave Cinema" by Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman, the movement drew inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Cassavetes, and Jonas Mekas (among other sources, not all cinematic). The thing burned hot for nearly a decade, with some filmmakers attaining a measure of super-stardom (Susan Seidelman breached the multiplex in 1985 with Desperately Seeking Susan) before compromise, gentrification, AIDS, and the changing cultural climate snuffed that candle out.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1949 but raised in the United States, Amos Poe was a 19 year-old student at Liberty in Eastern Europe at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968. Grabbing a camera, he filmed what he could of the influx of Russian tanks before beating it back to New York. In 1975, Poe and Czech-American composer Ivan Král cobbled together (on editing equipment rented from Albert and David Maysles for the princely sum of forty dollars) hours of footage of such unknown downtown bands as Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads into a musical chapbook that came to be regarded as the definitive punk rock documentary The Blank Generation (1976). Poe followed this with an homage to Godard, Unmade Beds (1976), a loose-knit riff on Breathless (1960) that featured Blondie's lead singer Deborah Harry alongside such downtown luminaries as Eric Mitchell, Fun Gallery permitee Patti Astor, and Duncan Hannah. Poe considered his next film, The Foreigner an "anti-homage" but his influences were conspicuous in the tale of a foreign agent roaming Manhattan to fulfill a contract so clandestine that even he does not know what the hell he is doing.

Shot guerilla-style in cost-effective black-and-white over the course of eight days with $5,000 in seed money (cadged as a car loan from the Merchants Bank of New York), The Foreigner evokes Godard's Alphaville (1965) with its sense of eerie urban displacement but its closer cinematic kin are Allen Baron's Blast of Silence (1961) and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), with which it shares a vibe of existential ennui. The Foreigner might be said to have had an influence on Scorsese's After Hours (1985) and Alex Cox's punk noir Repo Man (1984), to say nothing of the minimalism of Dogme 95. The filmmaker's lack of wherewithal dictated that the film be shot in sequence, as lead Eric Mitchell had only one suit to wear throughout principal photography. Filming a fight scene inside the punk mecca CBGB, Mitchell was knifed on camera by Cramps lead singer Lux Interior, whose use of the switchblade surprised both Poe and his leading man. Poe's locations also included JFK Airport, the Chelsea Hotel, and the then-newish World Trade Center (already seen in Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) and John Guillermin's 1976 King Kong remake), which provides an iconic and - thirty-five years after the fact - sobering backdrop to international intrigue on pennies a day.

Amos Poe had something like a shot at the mainstream with his 35mm feature Alphabet City (1984), starring Vincent Spano, but he paid his rent in the decades after the downtown punk scene imploded by shooting music videos, interviewing the odd celebrity for BOMB magazine, and teaching screenwriting classes at New York University. He also wrote the screenplay for the Columbia release Rocket Gibraltar (1988) starring Burt Lancaster, Kevin Spacey, and Macaulay Culkin and was set to direct before budget overruns led to his replacement by Daniel Petrie. (Poe's daughter Emily remained with the production to play one of Lancaster's grandchildren.) In 2004, Poe was invited to Spain to exhibit The Foreigner in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings and found Spanish audiences surprisingly receptive, intrigued, and unthreatened by material that would have had a markedly different effect if screened in Manhattan months after 9/11. More than a generation after its completion, The Foreigner continues to speak to the culture of fear and xenophobia with its displaced protagonist (whatever his motives may be) who laments that people will always be more interested in where you are from than in who you are.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Interview with Amos Poe by Sarah Charlesworth, BOMB, Spring 1981

"A Foreigner at Home" by Bruce Bennett, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2012

Burt Lancaster: An American Life by Kate Buford (Da Capo Press, 2001)

A Cultural History of Punk: 1974-1982 by Nicholas Rombes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2009)

Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly (Fantagraphics, 2010)