DANCE

MERCE CUNNINGHAM
In March 2005 Stanford University was host to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a week-long residency and tribute to Cunningham. This was an intensely inspiring and moving event: we had the opportunity to see Cunningham speak several times, in various interviews and panel discussions; and to watch the company perform and rehearse. Further high points included the participation of Christian Wolff as accompanying musician to the company, performing John Cage's Music for Piano and ASLSP with Cunningham's dances, as well as speaking to Mark Applebaum's undergraduate composition class and participating in the opening night "happening" with dancers Jonah Bokaer and Julie Cunningham.

If Cunningham's dance still seems to us preeminently interesting, other dance we like comes from some of the choreographers that emerged from the Judson Church—Trisha Brown, the contact improvisation of Steve Paxton in collaboration with Nancy Stark Smith...

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FILM

IN MEMORIAM DANIÈLE HUILLET (MAY 1, 1936–OCTOBER 9, 2006)
With Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet made some of the most beautiful and challenging of all films: films resolutely open to the radiance of the real, profoundly ethical, responsible to and extending the best in Western culture. Poto would like to pay tribute to these great artists—to Huillet's memory, to Straub's continuing, to their enduring work.

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100 ESSENTIAL FILMS
Poto takes its name from Jean-Pierre Gorin's 1978 film Poto and Cabengo; the image on our purpose page is a still of J.P. directing Tout va bien (1972), which is available on a Criterion DVD (with Letter to Jane); and J.P. has had a large influence on many in the Poto community, as artist and mentor. For an introduction to his work, see Erik Ulman's "Jean-Pierre Gorin" Senses of Cinema's Great Directors series.

I can't speak for all in the Poto community; but what follows is a personal list of 100 favorite films. Numerous other favorites have been sacrificed to this arbitrary number. In some cases I have selected less well-known movies at the expense of more famous ones; and I have tried to balance variety with the natural predominance of particular enthusiasms. Directors were restricted to no more than three or four films, so that Ford, Godard, Rossellini, Straub & Huillet, and a few others didn't dominate too absolutely. Some omissions reflect ignorance—contemporary cinema is represented by very few items, as I don't know much of what is probably the best work now being done; but I hope what follows may be of value.
—Erik Ulman

1. Kenneth Anger: Scorpio Rising (1964)
2. Anger: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1966 version)
3. Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura (1960)
4. Antonioni: L’Eclisse (1962)
5. Robert Beavers: The Hedge Theater (1983/2001)
6. Ingmar Bergman: The Silence (1963)
7. Bergman: Persona (1966)
8. Bergman: The Passion of Anna (1970)
9. Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man (1965)
10. Robert Bresson: Les Anges du péché (1943)
11. Bresson: L’Argent (1983)
12. Luis Buñuel: L’Age d’or (1930)
13. Frank Capra: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
14. John Cassavetes: A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
15. Charles Chaplin: City Lights (1931)
16. Chaplin: Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
17. Jean Cocteau: Orphée (1950)
18. Pedro Costa: Où gît votre sourire enfouie? (2002)
19. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
20. Carl Dreyer: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)
21. Dreyer: Vampyr (1932)
22. Dreyer: Ordet (1955)
23. Dreyer: Gertrud (1964)
24. Marguerite Duras: India Song (1975)
25. Sergei Eisenstein: Ivan the Terrible (1943/46)
26. Jean Eustache: La Maman et la putain (1973)
27. John Ford: My Darling Clementine (1946)
28. Ford: The Sun Shines Bright (1953)
29. Ford: The Searchers (1956)
30. Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
31. Georges Franju: Le Sang des bêtes (1949)
32. Philippe Garrel: Le Lit de la vierge (1969)
33. Garrel: La Cicatrice intérieure (1971)
34. Jean-Luc Godard: Le Mépris (1963)
35. Godard: 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (1967)
36. Godard: Weekend (1967)
37. Godard: Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1993)
38. Jean-Pierre Gorin: Poto and Cabengo (1978)
39. D.W. Griffith: A Corner in Wheat (1909)
40. Griffith: Intolerance (1916)
41. Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday (1940)
42. Hawks: Rio Bravo (1959)
43. Hawks and Christian Nyby: The Thing from Another World (1951)
44. Monte Hellman: The Shooting (1966)
45. Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo (1958)
46. Hitchcock: The Birds (1963)
47. Miklos Jancso: Elektra, My Love (1974)
48. Akira Kurosawa: High and Low (1963)
49. Fritz Lang: Secret Beyond the Door (1948)
50. Lang: Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960)
51. Charles Laughton: Night of the Hunter (1955)
52. Albert Lewin: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
53. Ernst Lubitsch: Trouble in Paradise (1932)
54. Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982)
55. Leo McCarey: Duck Soup (1933)
56. McCarey: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
57. Kenji Mizoguchi: Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
58. F.W. Murnau: Sunrise (1927)
59. Murnau: Tabu (1931)
60. G.W. Pabst: Pandora’s Box (1928)
61. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Teorema (1968)
62. Pasolini: Medea (1970)
63. Pasolini: Salò (1975)
64. Sam Peckinpah: Straw Dogs (1971)
65. Michael Powell: Peeping Tom (1960)
66. Otto Preminger: Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
67. Carol Reed: The Third Man (1949)
68. Jean Renoir: Le Crime de M. Lange (1936)
69. Renoir: La Règle du jeu (1939)
70. Renoir: Une Partie de campagne (1946)
71. Alain Resnais: Nuit et brouillard (1955)
72. Resnais: L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
73. Resnais: Muriel (1963)
74. Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia (1938)
75. Jacques Rivette: L’Amour fou (1969)
76. Rivette: Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre (1971/74)
77. Rivette: Céline et Julie vont au bateau (1974)
78. Rivette: Duelle (1976)
79. Roberto Rossellini: Stromboli (1950)
80. Rossellini: Viaggio in Italia (1953)
81. Rossellini: Blaise Pascal (1972)
82. Raul Ruiz: On Top of the Whale (1982)
83. Michael Snow: La Région centrale (1971)
84. Josef von Sternberg: The Scarlet Empress (1934)
85. Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet: Nicht Versöhnt (1965)
86. Straub/Huillet: The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1969)
87. Straub/Huillet: Moses und Aron (1975)
88. Straub: Le Genou d’Artemide (2007)
89. Erich von Stroheim: Greed (1924)
90. Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev (1969)
91. Tarkovsky: Solaris (1972)
92. Jacques Tati: Playtime (1967)
93. Jacques Tourneur: I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
94. Jean Vigo: L’Atalante (1934)
95. Andy Warhol: Vinyl (1965)
96. Warhol: The Chelsea Girls (1966)
97. Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
98. Welles: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
99. Welles: Touch of Evil (1958)
100. Wim Wenders: The State of Things (1982)

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LITERATURE

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and the splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption."

PAUL CELAN
"A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality."

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MUSIC

NOTE
Many of the Poto community are musicians—composers, improvisors, performers. Many and diverse sources feed our creative work. Here we will post some lists of or commentaries on work that interests and informs us.

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DANCE
Merce Cunningham

FILM
In Memoriam: Danièle Huillet
100 Essential Films
unseen films

LITERATURE
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Paul Celan

MUSIC
note