Robert Attanasio

Dear Lance,

I'm shocked.

Never expected Robert would go so quickly. People fade out for years and Robert did not at all look the part of someone dying or even ill when we saw him last. He was totally his boisterous bigger-than-life self ordering and enjoying treasured dishes from an Italian restaurant that spreading Chinatown had engulfed. Flo says yes, it could be, that it was the beginning of August when he told us how invaded he was with cancer. We hadn’t seen each other often but I had brotherly feelings towards him, to this very recognizable city street-kid. New York has taken a hit.

We’ll be there tomorrow, thank you for telling us. “Celebrate him”, yes, you’re right. He was a rare visitation.

It’s been difficult, this writing, because he seemed to have stopped screening his films around long ago and wasn’t coming out to see work. I had no idea he’d kept making films and so many. He’d become a gallery artist, not something we’re so comfortable with while he seemed in his element Last movies we saw were his pseudo-tv ads when I had no give for the humor despite his humor being so similar to my own, mocking the same things and finding amusement in the weird novelties that get marketed. I was picturing him holding forth to his audiences at Anthology with his sweeping arm movements, undimin- ished despite invasion and impossible to the last.

Great that you’re screening the film Flo and I loved at first sight (I’m realizing this is is the writing that was eluding me, besides the interruption of gigs out of the country), SOUND CAMERA ROTATION star- ring the wonderful Millie Iatro. A marvel of witty abstract cinema, now that his films will be preserved and regularly shown by Anthology Film Archives it will get the acknowledgment it always deserved.

The following is what I wrote about his work some time ago: Robert Attanasio's works vary radically from each other, proceeding as they do, not from a camera or editing technique but from fresh germinal "recipes" he dreams up. Each film is an entirely new mix of the given sights and sounds of the world meeting up with the basic means of cinema. His "signature" rises from the diversity not as any sort of look but from a unique style of thinking. Often one senses a bemused "what would happen if" mischie- vousness at the idiosyncratic heart of his creations. He does truly unexpected things with the most transparent of subject matters, making for delicious mystifications. His substance is in his aimlessness, or rather in the atmospheres set in motion in place of recognizably serious aims. Robert Attanasio is one subtle, non-stuffy, "mind-expanding" cine-troublemaker”.

The beautiful troublemaker is gone. Robert (never Bob), it was a pleasure to know you.

Ken Jacobs 11.14.15