i. m. Allen Kirkpatrick

Allen Kirkpatrick died on the afternoon of December 10, 2021. Allen was a life-long friend and artistic influence, a filmmaker and poet.  As an American experimental filmmaker, he was active in the avant-garde film scene beginning in the late 1960s and primarily in the 1970s, in New York City.  His first major 16mm film, Orange Jesuit (see below) is dated from 1972.  Neon (also given in the linked video file) is from 1971.

Orange Jesuit deals with conceptions of religion, demonstrated primarily through juxtaposition and contrast (the title itself is inherently paradoxical), informed to some extent by Mao’s theory of contradiction (which in turn is of course more broadly related to Marxist dialectics).  The film is also informed to a degree by Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Hurrahing in Harvest”: “The heart rears wings bold and bolder / And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet”—with the filmmaker himself, who appears as the protagonist throughout, seen “off under his feet” at the conclusion.

Kirkpatrick began his artistic career as a poet in Philadelphia, before moving to Manhattan and into film and visual art as well as continuing to write poetry.  His magnum opus is perhaps Adrenalin Devours the Blood (1975), which includes live footage of Lou Reed.

Obituary: https://www.altoonamirror.com/obituaries/2021/12/allen-kirkpatrick/

R. Allen Kirkpatrick, 1937-2021.