Reviews of SUBWAY RIDERSAmos Poe's portrait of an isolated psychopath acting out his obsession in the hostile night of Manhattan owes something to Taxi Driver but doesn't stoop to splashy shoot-outs and the pathos of Scorsese's Jodie Foster character. The mannered performances of his three female leads exploit the lure of a sexuality both glamorous and sinister. The plot is sacrificed to the lingering depiction of their menacing charms, but the dramatic expressionistic lighting and outré attire make one forget how many digressions occur during Detective Langley's hunt for the killer. Johanna Heer's cinematography superbly conveys the ominous nocturnal atmosphere of streets and subways. Buildings drip threatening shadows, echoes rattle down deserted subway platforms, even brownstone steps exude malevolence in the murky light. —Kathleen Hulser, The Film Journal :: No instrument can make a lascivious suggestion better than a saxophone in the hands of a pervert, and Amos Poe's Subway Riders understands this and many other things about the doomed people whose lives begin when the sun goes down... This movie isn't a narrative, it's an environment... This movie is shot in the neon colors of the night. It is acted very well. You do not analyze this movie... Subway Riders is a hymn to style. It is not an imitation of old Hollywood B pictures ... it is a meditation on them. There are eight million stories in the city, and this is one of them. —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times :: Urban dread and decadence blend in a sophisticated thriller. —Kathleen Hulser, The Film Journal :: Amos Poe is one of the lights of America's emerging independent film movement... Subway Riders is a chilling melodrama of angst, alienation and obsession... Subway Riders' music does not merely accompany the film, but occupies its own aural space and so adds its own distinct perspective to this highly stylized, richly textured portrait of a world of random murders... Poe's attitudes toward Hollywood are producing a new body of work that is raw, vital, beholden to no established theory of economics or aesthetics —J. McLaughlin, The Boston Globe :: Amos Poe's Subway Riders has the look of a film thrown together in a fit of psychotic inspiration. Needless to say, Johanna Heer's cinematography is stunning. The gritty cityscapes pictured in Subway Riders are far more honest and provocative in their presentation than the schmaltz of more pretentious productions like Manhattan... Poe's melding of traditional film noir elements with a frenetic new wave sensibility electrifies the audience with the intensity of a third rail. —Mike Ferris, The Harvard Independent :: Amos Poe: The Prince of the New Wave As Breathless is the "nouvelle vague," Subway Riders is the "new wave." So what's new? Nothing, if it isn't essential. Like Godard, Poe brings to life the movies as soon as he gets near a camera. Subway Riders is a movie that takes changes, that isn't afraid of the unknown. Sublime is the moment near the middle of the film, when our hero, Anthony Zindo, played by Amos Poe himself – is taken in by a woman (or so it first seems). But we soon understand that this character is asexual, out of time and outside of space. Its an angel! An angel that flies through the night in its car to rescue the saxophonist. And that moment sublime is nothing next to that other sequence, where the detective's wife, a notorious junkie, gives herself a show of heroin in her tongue. This scene, horrible in Cayatte and many other moviemakers, is funny in Subway Riders. Poe confronts her with a soundtrack — stupefying from one end to the other — that takes the word 'horse' (meaning heroin) literally. During the fix the sound of galloping horses rises slowly; when the operation climaxes, the soundtrack gives us horses neighing. For two hours, Poe creates his world, the night, the world that is the culture of the New Wave. Desolation. He weaves in 16mm color the threads of a subterranean and muddy scene — as he announces in the prologue that his film will be without any concessions. We understand that the sax player does not kill for the pleasure of killing, but because he is constrained by the fact that he can't live for his desire. In some way, its as if we had in front of the camera, the negative and positive of a film. The negative being death, and the positive, the temerous and fragile face of the saxplayer. Poe is the filmmaker of the present. His camera, even if it lets itself go in long dreamy shots of the streets of new York, even if it ventures into excessively colored apartments, even if it freezes the actions, his camera (as I was saying) looks for only one thing: to freeze the present second at its most fragile most ungraspable; to stop it in its tracks. Therefore, the importance of the sacred within Poe, and more so the baroque, is that the Rock pulverises the moment. And one always has the impression in Subway Riders, that Poe is in the middle, collecting the thousands of fragments and sparks provoked by the collision of two characters, in order to re-fuse them, and stop them for eternity. therefore, the fascination with bodies in Subway Riders. In Lust for Life, the tender love turns tragic. But in Subway Riders there is no more love, and there are many dead. Modern James Dean, Anthony Zindo, his only 'cause' the sax, sinks calmly into death. One must see Subway Riders if only for the extraordinary moments, where Amos Poe, filmed in a light dive, lifts his eyes, wet with despair, to the audience; taking the spectator as a witness to the feeling that there is nothing left to do ... except to make movies as well as possible — in which he succeeds at perfectly. It is one of the least narcissistic planes in the history of cinema. Subway Riders is more than a Hemingwayan film, it is the flagbearer of a culture of despair. The 'new wave', that's what it is! Poe films the night the way Nick Ray would have liked to, and Rock the way Godard never knew how to. —Gerard Courant, Cinéma ::
Pick the unfamiliar name: Francis Coppola. George Lucas. Amos Poe. Martin Scorsese. Steven Spielberg. If you said, "None of the above," your moviegoing habits are truly exploratory. For those who picked Poe, well, there was a time when those other names were unfamiliar, too. Poe is a leading representative of filmmakers who work off the conventional commercial track, a direction sometimes called avant garde and sometimes underground, although both of those labels have become so conventional themselves by now as not to be properly descriptive. "I prefer to be populist...or pop," Poe said, "rather than to be geared to a ghettoized audience. My whole thing has been to grow with each film, each time to have it seen by more people." His latest, Subway Riders, can be seen at 11:30pm tomorrow at the Bleecker St. Cinema, where it has been having a long late-night run. Subway Riders is about a mysterious saxophonist who plays in lonely spots around the city at night, shooting the people he attracts. A detective (with a drug addict wife adding to his problems) is in determined pursuit of the killer. There's also a prostitute who lives in the apartment above the sax player and can't stand his practicing, and a mysterious blonde who is on the sax player's trail for her own reasons. The story takes place in the mind of a screenwriter, played by Poe, and it's done in the style of 1940s hardboiled romantic detective movies. Johanna Heer, a native of Vienna, Poe's associate since 1977 and co-producer and director of photography for Subway Riders, said, "On one level, the man struggling to play a saxophone is a metaphor for trying to make a film." Poe said, "Well, I see it as a much larger metaphor. If you look at people like Chapman or Hinckley, who become psychotic or sociopathic...I worked off the perception of violence in American society, which seems to come out of some identity crisis. Adding to the murkiness of the Subway Riders narrative is the fact that John Lurie, playing the saxophonist, left the movie while it was in progress because of commitments to his musical group, the Lounge Lizards, and non-musician Poe stepped in to play him in in the uncompleted scenes. Two men playing the same character adds an interesting identity twist. "We could have reshot the footage," Poe said, "but to me it was more interesting to see if the process of making the film could be incorporated into making the film." Heer: "We had three hours of film. Heer: "It wouldn't be any less coherent than it is now." Despite this temporary variance in opinion, Poe and Heer have an obvious working creative partnership going. Poe was born in Israel in 1950, son of a father who had fled Czechoslovakia during the Nazi invasion and of a mother who had fled Germany. His father, a commander in the Israeli army, was killed in action in 1956 and his mother brought him to New York. Poe, visiting his father's relatives in Czechoslovakia in 1968, was on the spot when the Russians invaded that country and he took pictures of the military action (being just naive enough not to know the risk he was taking). With the money he got for the sale of the photos he started a film career. He made a lot of "little movies" until his first "features," the half-hour Night Lunch and 55-minute the Blank Generation, both documentaries of rock groups and both made in association with musician Ivan Kral. Unmade Beds, loosely based on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, brazenly passing off New York City as Paris, came in 1976, and The Foreigner, about a blond man in white on the run from mysterious pursuers, was made in 1977. It stars Eric Mitchell, himself a director-writer in this particular filmmaking scene, whose Underground U.S.A. is showing at the Bleecker St. Cinema Friday and Saturday. For one of his next projects, Poe would like to remake Godard's Alphaville, for which he says he paid Godard $10,000 with 10% down for the rights. Poe's movies have been shown in Europe, so he has an international reputation. The question always arises though of how these filmmakers live. Poe in times past has been shipping clerk, office manager and book store salesman. "Night Lunch cost about $500 to make," he said, "so we made our money back just from showing it three times at CBGB's, but to keep making movies is tough. I live on loans and I do 'gigs,' film and video seminars at universities, assignments I get based on my practical experience. I think I could make more commercial films in the right environment." That means with the right financing. Wouldn't that compromise him? "I'm not worried about that," Poe said. "I'm more worried about not being able to grow." Heer suggested it would be nice if some rich person who recognized artistic talent were willing to back a filmmaker on that basis alone. Poe commented that such people, called patrons, were part of the historical past. "Maybe they can be reborn," Heer said. —Ernest Leogrande, The Daily News :: Down in the Tube Station Ever wonder how Manhattan must look through the eyes of those fellows who lie on the sidewalk with a constant hangover? Panoramic grime, harsh sounds, broken dreams and ugly lights, life lower than it was ever meant to be. It's easy to see why Amos Poe is not on television singing, "I love New'York!" Subway Riders is not a film about mass transit but rather it is about the big city alienation which is so manifest down in the tubes. A psychotic saxophone player who lures pedestrians with his music then shoots them down provides the tenuous plotline. But the narration detours rather widely to include the rambling failure stories of a few other characters who are among the truly seedy. These include the upstairs prostitute whose sex practice is disturbed by his sax practice. Then there's the dullard cop who is having domestic problems with his wife the heroin addict. Eventually the murder/manhunt story becomes secondary to the neurotic revelations of all of these lost souls. Saxophonist John Lurie was cast as the murderer. Lurie exudes an eerie screen presence with his despondent face and faraway eyes. Give him a horn to vent his suffering and you've got the essential lone soul like Pruitt in From Here to Eternity. Before the film was completed, however, Lurie was forced to return to his band The Lounge Lizards. This group provided much of the score with the "fake jazz" sound which is beginning to fill the void in New York's No Wave music scene. In a bizarre directorial move, Amos Poe himself stepped in to play the lead without reshooting. Lurie's scenes, hence, have two actors in the same role. Who is this Amos Poe anyway? Currently he is just another avant garde filmmaker, an aspiring Godard. His early films were New Wave and punk docu-concerts, only a notch above the quality of home movies. Now he appears to be headed for bigger budgets and more marketable scenarios. Subway Riders is his first film to employ paid actors and it shows some creative potential. Constrained by a meager budget, he resorts to simple lighting imagery, one character always framed in red, another in yellow, the killer always mired in darkness. He exhibits an obvious sense of humanity gone sour as he dotes stylistically on the junkie's delerium then explores the numb rage of the Chapman/Hinckley syndrome. Poe investigates the debris of society like a detective picking through trash. Be warned, however, that this film was shot in ten days with almost no money. Editing, sound quality, camera work and acting all rate a solid half star. The script itself is just one man's vision of despair, so it is apt to sacrifice entertainment for selfindulgence. It may not make for a fun eveing but if Amos Poe becomes the next George Lucas you might wish to recall that you knew him when ... —Peter Thompson The Tech, 10.20.81 (London) :: Back to FILMS LIST
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