NOW PLAYING: Joel Singer's POET IN ORBIT (1980)
/September 22, 2026 marked the opening of the George Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, California. Joel Singer’s rarely-screened solo work POET IN ORBIT (1980), which features footage of James Broughton, was selected to screen in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition. To commemorate this event, GME is pleased to present POET IN ORBIT this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room.
POET IN ORBIT joins several other titles by Broughton and Singer in our distribution library, which are now available for rental or purchase to academic and cultural institutions worldwide. To learn more about those titles, please visit Big Joy: The Films of James Broughton and Joel Singer.
POET IN ORBIT was filmed in 1980 in Broughton and Singer’s home in Novato, California. It consists of 16mm footage Singer shot of Broughton, who was seated on a swivel chair. In the film, Broughton turns the chair ever so slightly from left to right and right to left, until completing a 360-degree circle, with Singer capturing each movement frame-by-frame.
As noted by Singer: ““It took most of a week to film the two minutes. James got dizzy but we persisted... I showed Lou Harrison [the composer] the silent film and he created the fabulous gamelan soundtrack. The film has been seen by very few people. It was never in distribution and was essentially lost until I discovered it in my digital files. James and I used a brief excerpt of the film in our film SCATTERED REMAINS (1988) and a very brief excerpt of it was used in the wonderful documentary on James' life, BIG JOY.”
