The filmmaker Amos Poe has died in New York, aged 76, after a battle with cancer. Poe was never a figure who courted the limelight. His work thrived in between scenes, between movements, between ownership and erasure — and his place in American film history remains oddly provisional for someone who helped define a moment so completely.
Poe arrived at the centre of things early. Born in 1949 in Tel Aviv and raised in the United States, he came of age just as New York was fraying. The city of the mid-1970s — broke, dirty, violent, permissive — was not a backdrop so much as raw material. Poe didn’t document it from a distance; he moved through it with a handheld camera and a loose sense of permission, filming as if the future of cinema might be decided on the pavement.
His breakthrough, The Blank Generation (1975–76), co-directed with Ivan Král (Patti Smith Group bass player), remains one of the foundational documents of Punk culture. It captured The Ramones, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, and Wayne/Jane County — not as legends-in-waiting but as people killing time, trying things out, burning energy. The film had no interest in polish or narrative coherence. What it offered instead was proximity. You feel the rooms closing in, the sweat, the boredom, the electricity. Rolling Stone later placed it among the greatest punk films ever made, but at the time, it barely registered as cinema at all. That was the point.
Poe’s films consistently rejected the formalism that still lingered in downtown filmmaking. Where earlier generations leaned toward structural rigour or conceptual purity, Poe embraced mess. Unmade Beds (1976), The Foreigner (1978), and Subway Riders (1979–81) unfold with a nervous, pressured energy — people in transit, people stuck, people acting out because there’s nowhere else to go. They are often funny, sometimes tender, occasionally cruel. Amateur actors drift in and out. Scenes begin late and end early. Nothing settles.
This looseness aligned him with what would later be called No Wave Cinema, though Poe was never interested in labels. The films reflected a city hollowed out by economic collapse but alive with unofficial freedoms. You could shoot where you liked. You could invent rules as you went. The camera followed bodies in motion — on subways, in bars, across streets — as if stillness might be fatal.
Alongside his filmmaking, Poe was a fixture in New York’s broader cultural ecosystem. He directed episodes of TV Party, the public-access show hosted by Glenn O’Brien and Chris Stein, which served as a low-budget salon for downtown art, music, and nonsense. It shared Poe’s sensibility: messy, alert, uninterested in permission.
In later years, Poe described himself as part of the Remodernist movement, positioning his work as a continuation rather than a recycling of earlier forms. He resisted nostalgia. “Using the technology and the sensibility of the contemporary,” he said in 1981, mattered more than preserving style. That attitude followed him into his later work, including the screenplay for Amy Redford’s The Guitar (2008), which carried traces of his earlier concerns — isolation, rhythm, interior pressure — into a very different register.
Poe’s career is inseparable from a long, bruising story about authorship and loss. In 2012, he lost ownership of several of his key films in a lawsuit brought by Král over licensing profits. By the end of the decade, Poe had effectively been written out of his own work. Screenings of The Blank Generation appeared with altered endings, revised credits, and his name removed entirely. At one point, audiences were shown what they believed was a historic film only to discover it had been quietly rewritten.
It was a cruel irony for a filmmaker whose work was so invested in presence — in being there, camera running, before things disappeared. Poe lived long enough to see his contributions contested, diluted, and, in places, erased. That he kept working anyway feels characteristic.
He is survived by his wife, Claudia Summers, whom he married in 2019, three children, and a body of work that refuses to sit still. Poe’s films don’t behave. They don’t resolve. They don’t ask to be liked. They move with the twitchy confidence of people who know the ground might drop away at any moment.
New York has changed beyond recognition since Poe first picked up a camera. The conditions that made his films possible — cheap rent, loose enforcement, cultural disregard — are gone. What remains are images that still feel slightly dangerous. Not because they shock, but because they are unabashedly honest.