Writings and Relics: 1990-1995 chronicles a volatile, formative stretch in the life of filmmaker Michael Almereyda — years marked by ambition, collapse, improvisation, and unlikely resurrection. Framed as a "dossier or time capsule" rather than a memoir, the book assembles essays, unpublished fragments, film stills, storyboards, sketches, postcards, and personal photographs into a vivid portrait of downtown New York in the early 1990s — with side trips to locales as varied as Kadoka, South Dakota and Montpelier, France.
At the book's center are the making of Another Girl Another Planet, shot on a $45 Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, and the genesis of Nadja, produced with the support of David Lynch, plus unrealized projects — concerning Amelia Earhart and Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky transposed to the East Village, and a tale of supernaturally gifted surfers — that flicker with possibility even in failure.
Almereyda writes about friendship, artistic stubbornness, flirtations with Hollywood, artistic stubbornness and the strange freedom of working on the margins. Equally revealing are notes on Surrealism and vampires, graveside location scouting, and the challenges of fitting an elephant in an apartment, plus encounters with key colleagues: Elina Löwensohn, Sam Shepard, Leos Carax, Derek Jarman, and Lynch himself. What emerges is not simply an inventory of films made and unmade, but a meditation on creative survival—on how relics, however fragile, can reflect the glow of a life in motion.
Michael Almereyda's films span narrative and documentary works, features and shorts. They include William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, Skinningrove, Experimenter, Marjorie Prime, Escapes, and three films with Ethan Hawke: Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Tesla. Almereyda has edited and written essays for books about Vladimir Mayakovsky, Manny Farber, William Eggleston, and Garry Winogrand. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Artforum, Bookforum, and other publications.
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