Jaye Bartell

THE STORY IS TRUE: ROBERT CREELEY ON FILM Program 5 Tonight 5/16 at 6:15 Presented by Raymond Foye! Robert Creeley and Stan Brakhage first met in the mid-sixties in an encounter Creeley described as “love at first sight,” and the two remained friends and allies until Brakhage’s death in 2003. “It is light and the eye which experiences it that seem to me the two insistent terms of activity as a film-maker,” Creeley writes in “Mehr Licht,” his 1968 essay on the filmmaker. “I know that he has also deep concern with ‘what things mean’ and with basic human relationships—but light, in all its modality, as ‘seeing sees it,’ is much more to my own mind his insistent preoccupation.” In turn, Brakhage described Creeley as a poet of “dimensions,” declaring at a 1991 panel discussion, “Robert Creeley, of all the many, many poets I’ve known and known closely, is the only one that really clearly understands film as a possible art.” The selections herein represent the single collaboration between the two, as well as two works about which Creeley has either written or spoken. Stan Brakhage TWO: CREELEY/MCCLURE 1965, 3 min, 16mm, silent Stan Brakhage THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES 1971, 32 min, 16mm, silent Stan Brakhage SHORT FILMS 1975 #1-10 1975, 36.5 min, 16mm, silent ****************** Can't make it tonight? This program will show again on May 19 at 6:30 PM. @jaye.bartell @raymondfoye

THE STORY IS TRUE: ROBERT CREELEY ON FILM Program 4 Tonight 5/15 at 7:30 Filmmaker in person! ⭐ Colin Still BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES: A FILM ON ROBERT CREELEY 2025, 94 min, digital Filmed primarily throughout 2002, Colin Still’s BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES allows Robert Creeley to reflect on his life and work with a great deal of patience and unobtrusive guidance. Rarely, if ever, screened, the film provides an invaluable view of Creeley in what would be the last years of his life (he died on March 30, 2005). Equally significant is the commentary from Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, two of Creeley’s closest colleagues in later life, as well as from poet, musician, artist, and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins (1930-2018), who was married to Creeley for nearly 20 years and contributed visual art to many of his 1970s publications with Black Sparrow Press. The wonderfully eccentric and sadly unheralded Vincent Ferini appears throughout as well. A lifelong denizen of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Ferini figures prominently throughout Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems as he was an early reader and champion of the poet. It was Ferini who first put Olson in touch with Robert Creeley, leading to a correspondence and relationship that would go on to shape midcentury American writing. **************** ~AND~ 🌦Your Creeley forecast for the weekend: Sat. 5/16 Pgm 1: POETRY IN MOTION, 4:00 Sat. 5/16 Pgm 5: CREELEY/BRAKHAGE, 6:15 Sun. 5/17 Pgm 4: BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES, 5:15 Sun. 5/17 Pgm 2: BRUCE JACKSON & DIANE CHRISTIAN, 8:00 @jaye.bartell

Tonight, 5/13, the Robert Creeley series continues with Programs 2 and 3 at 6:45 and 9:00 respectively. Program 2 will be presented by special guests Will Creeley and Grayson Goga! Program 3 will be presented by special guest and poet Charles Bernstein! 6:45 ROBERT CREELEY, PGM 2: BRUCE JACKSON & DIANE CHRISTIAN Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian WILLY’S READING 1982, 16 min, 16mm Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian CREELEY 1988, 59 min, 16mm Grayson Goga & Grace Stalley FOR WILL 2016, 13 min, digital TRT: ca. 95 min. ……………………………….. 9:00 ROBERT CREELEY, PGM 3: USA: POETRY Richard O. Moore USA: POETRY: ROBERT CREELEY (1966, 29 min, 16mm-to-DCP) USA: POETRY: ROBERT DUNCAN & JOHN WIENERS (1966, 29 min, 16mm-to-DCP) TRT: ca. 65 min. (Stills from CREELEY by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian) @jaye.bartell

(Photo of Anne Waldman, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg by Laure A Leber) It's opening night of THE STORY IS TRUE: ROBERT CREELEY ON FILM at Anthology Film Archives! To start things off we have Ron Mann's POETRY IN MOTION, presented by the wonderful and wonder-making Anne Waldman! Ron Mann POETRY IN MOTION 1982, 90 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Charles Bukowski, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Helen Adam, Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Four Horsemen, Michael Ondaatje, Christopher Dewdney, John Giorno, Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, Gary Snyder, Jim Carroll, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Miguel Algarin, and Ted Milton. An intergenerational roll-call of twentieth century poets from Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann, this performance compilation provides a crucial perspective on Robert Creeley and many of his peers a decade or more after what could be considered the pinnacle of the various movements outlined in Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. Mann and his many subjects resist the commemorative approach, focusing on the present as it then was. Creeley reads two pieces of new work from a notebook – “Self Portrait” and “Bresson’s Movies” – demonstrating that he remained truly a working poet. (Both poems appear, unchanged from the original, in the 1983 collection Mirrors.) POETRY IN MOTION also showcases a younger generation that both follows and furthers the practices of the Beat/Black Mountain/New York School era, most significantly with a luminous, stentorian performance by Anne Waldman, as well as equally significant appearances by Jim Carroll and Ted Berrigan.

Robert Creeley was a poet of relationships and their many, varied forms within human life. The most familiar term to even the casual reader of Creeley’s work is company. For more than 50 years and across more than 60 books of poetry, prose, and simply writing, company was the subject and object, the aim and the means, the dream and its opposite. Next to family (including dogs), the pillar of Creeley’s work was friendship: with fellow poets and teachers, musicians, and, most generatively, visual artists. In recognition and celebration of Robert Creeley’s centennial, Anthology presents a slate of films made about and very much with the writer, including documentaries, profiles, and portraits, such as one by Stan Brakhage, who said, perhaps hyperbolically, of his lifelong friend, “Robert Creeley, of all the many, many poets I’ve known and known closely, is the only one that really clearly understands film as a possible art.” Additionally, the program includes works that Creeley lectured or wrote about during his exhaustively documented life, with films by Brakhage and Robert Bresson. Guest-programmed by Jaye Bartell. For full program details, visit our website. @jaye.bartell Special thanks to Will Creeley & Hannah Cedermark; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Charles Bernstein; Raymond Foye; Grayson Goga; Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian; Anjelica James (WNET); Ron Mann; Grace Stalley; Colin Still; and Anne Waldman. Image credits: Photos 1-5, 7 by Bruce Jackson Still 6 from POETRY IN MOTION

“It is very difficult to sum up briefly …” It always was. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me in the last 20 years is aware of my affinity for Robert Creeley’s writing. COMPANY – finding it, understanding it (or trying to), celebrating it – was the impetus and outcome of so much of his work, and, as Charles Bernstein remarked in the 1995 episode of LINEbreak (I think), Creeley’s work somehow creates “company,” or leads to it among its readers. “In evidence … or evidence,” many of my dearest friends of 20 years or more arose from meetings occasioned somehow by Creeley’s work. I met Will Hubbard at a memorial reading at Black Mountain College Museum in 2005 after Creeley’s death; at a 2006 symposium in Buffalo I met Aaron Lowinger @aalowi , and through him, a wealth of poets and filmmakers, several of whom have been lifelong friends since. (I moved to Buffalo three months after the conference.) It was in Buffalo that I was first introduced to so-called experimental film by filmmaker friends (@ekrem_serdar_ ), who showed me work by Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, and Ken Jacobs. In no small way I am here at Anthology, where I’ve worked for ten years, thanks to Buffalo, and I lived in Buffalo thanks to Creeley – if not him personally, as I never met him, then the company he and his work kept. And it is Anthology, specifically @jedrapfogel , I have to thank for the opportunity to program THE STORY IS TRUE: ROBERT CREELEY ON FILM, to celebrate the poet’s 100th birthday, and to give a small testament in gratitude for the poet and poetry that has been one of the richest gifts to my life and its simplest pleasure. (Maybe I’m overstating things as I tend to do, but do we want silken artificial intelligence or do we want real, splintery, negligible intelligence!) I’ll be honored to host an almost uncanny array of outstanding people joining in the programs, including Will Creeley, Anne Waldman, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Foye, & Colin Still. As Creeley wrote, “Love lights light in like eyes.” Full series information and descriptions at link in bio, and anthologyfilmarchives.org

Small scene from a recent visit to the transit museum • 35mm, Minolta SRT 101

Mugs

New direction … Portrait commissions always open #chinup

It’s Look at Me Week here in New York City … next up (or first) is a screening on Friday, 2/13, of a new photo slideshow movie at my home away from home, @anthologyfilmarchives ! When Holes Taste Good We’ll Put Them in Our Bread screens as part of @jedrapfogel ‘s brilliant series Avant-Garde Ads. It’s 150 selections from my ongoing wheat-paste ad diptychs undertaking. “The focus of this program is on billboards and other forms of street advertising, as documented by an eclectic collection of filmmakers including William Klein, Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter, Manuel DeLanda, Thom Anderson, and Anthology’s own Jaye Bartell. Friday, February 13 7:00 PM SIGNS OF THE TIMES William Klein BROADWAY BY LIGHT (1958, 12 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Newly restored!) Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter SIGN PAINTERS (1972, 6 min, 16mm) Manuel DeLanda ISM ISM (1979, 8 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.) Jaye Bartell WHEN HOLES TASTE GOOD WE’LL PUT THEM IN OUR BREAD (2025, 5.5 min, DCP) Thom Andersen GET OUT OF THE CAR (2010, 34 min, 16mm)

Sunday Matinee at Sunview Acropolis! featuring knockdown performances by Vague Snow • Tom Dennis • Jaye Bartell and faint-worthy screenings of films by Mary Helena Clark • Kara Ditte Hansen • Jesse Malmed • Luciana Decker Orozco • Colby Richardson • Sara Sowell • Sam Taffel on on variously glorious 8mm, 16mm, and digital • Sunday, 2/15, 5 pm

Some from a recent approach. All it takes is a slight tilt of perspective to look totally ridiculous. #chickensoupforthesoul