CITY Issue 55 - (Page 42) CITY LIFE / SMALL TALK NEW YORK OBSERVERS At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, two filmmakers point their cameras at Gotham’s ever-changing landscape. CITY’s Erin Bremer speaks with Amos Poe and Douglas Keeve about shooting the city they call home. W innowed down from a record , submissions, some films will g eet audiences at this yea ’s T ibeca Film Festival p esented by me ican Exp ess when it opens p il . Founded to evitalize downtown Manhattan a e / , T ibeca is now ente ing its seventh yea . On the eve of the festival, CIT caught up with two filmmake s whose documenta ies in competition each focus on an iconic piece of New o k histo y. Fo Empi e II, mos II Poe filmed the Empi e State Building and othe sights f om his West Village apa tment fo an enti e yea . He then comp essed ove hou s of footage into a th eehou homage to the city. c oss town, Douglas Keeve documented the histo y and einvention of the once-“democ atic” but nea ly defunct G ame cy Pa k Hotel, which debuted its cont ove sial top-to-bottom edesign by hotelie Ian Sch age and a tist Julian Schnabel in . Keeve’s Hotel and Poe’s Empi e II a e just a pa t of the festival’s lineup, available in full at www.t ibecafilmfestival.o g. shooting it. I just said, “Okay, it’s eithe going to wo k o not wo k but I’m not going to look at it until it’s done.” I gave myself exactly a yea , so I moved in on Novembe , , and the fi lm was fi nished shooting Octobe , which of cou se would be Halloween. nd you had the pe fect vantage point fo the Village Halloween pa ade, which ends the fi lm. Is it ch onological, the way it’s edited? It’s ch onological but the e’s no editing involved at all. I ealized that I did not want to edit one f ame [even though] I ended up with hou s. So, how do I end up with th ee hou s if I have hou s without cutting anything? That’s whe e the whole digital thing comes in. I just told the compute to make it , pe cent faste o times as fast. So, what you’ e seeing is not only time captu ed inte mittently but then ultimately comp essed times as fast, which is what gives you the whole ene gy of New o k. So you just spo adically tu ned the came a on and off th oughout the yea ? eah, I would tu n it on fo a few hou s, and then tu n it off when I got bo ed. Then I would tu n it on fo anothe few hou s o a day o minutes o whateve felt like the ight thing, so it was completely like how you feel du ing the day. So, wheneve I would look out the window and I would see something and go, “Oh, hey, that looks cool; I wonde what that’s going to look like in the came a,” I would tu n the came a on and make it out of focus o high-cont ast o make it eally da k, whateve . So, basically what you’ e seeing is a ch onological yea but totally edited in the came a and the e’s no editing involved in the pictu e at all. So what I ealized when I t ied to lay music on the e was that any music wo ked with it because the visual has a hythm of its own because of the time lapse and the comp ession. long with you own spoken wo ds, the soundt ack featu es eve yone f om Lucinda Williams to The Ramones. How did you pick the music? I knew that fo th ee hou s, o even if they watch th ee minutes of it, I needed to take the audience on an emotional jou ney. So, the jou ney that they we e on was going to be done th ough music, so sometimes the music will pick you up and sometimes the music will soothe you. nd all of the natu al sounds, the ain and thunde and si ens and wind, we e added in post-p oduction? eah, so while the image y is completely accidental, the sound is actually completely manufactu ed — the cont ast between those two ideas. How does this fi lm fit into the emode nist movement that you’ e a pa t of? The emode nist movement: I’m not even su e what that means, actually. It’s just a bunch of kids who said, “Hey, you’ e a emode nist. ou want to be a pa t of ou c owd?” nd I said, “Su e, why not?” [He lau hs.] I’m not completely su e. [ AMOS POE / EMPIRE II e filmin ea l pe fo mances b such a tists as Patti Smith, Blondie, and the Tal in Heads at le enda enue CBGB, mos Poe edited the mate ial and eleased The Blank Gene ation in , establishin himself as one of the fathe s of indie documenta ies. Fo his latest film, Empi e II, all he had to do as loo out his indo . CIT : Whe e did you get the idea fo Empi e II? MOS POE: I was moving into this apa tment and, of cou se, the view was the whole thing, so the fi st thing I moved in was the came a with no idea of what I was doing, eally. But I just kept fi lming and captu ing image y ove the cou se of a yea , which is what I like about it: It’s not p emeditated in some way. The e’s no sc ipt, and you don’t have to go out and aise money and all the usual stuff that you do when you make a new movie. It was eally just expe iential. So as things we e going and I would fool a ound with the came a, it sta ted to dawn on me that what I was doing was kind of a emake of ndy Wa hol’s Empi e, which is such a classic of conceptual fi lmmaking. So Wa hol wasn’t the o iginal inspi ation? No. It became one of the efe ence points, but I ealized that I was doing it so diffe ently than what ndy did. It’s not black and white. I kept thinking that I was going to add sound o spoken wo d o music o something and then it just kind of g ew out of that. I shot time lapse, so a lot of it was one-and-a-half seconds eve y seconds. nd I neve looked at [the footage] the whole yea I was CITY 42 TY POE: PHOTO BY ALEXIS DAHAN. http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org
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