It was 10 a.m. on a Wednesday in 2006, and I had cut class to attend a press screening of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. I rushed into the already packed auditorium, eager to catch the filmmaker’s bratty jab at costume dramas—despite all the negative buzz that was already in the air—as well as attend my first New York Film Festival screening. I walked into the theater and stared in horror; shocked because I was the youngest person in the room.
The auditorium was packed with notable mainstays of the New York critical establishment—like Rex Reed and William Wolf—but not one single “know-nothing” blogger or youthful upstart could be found. Nobody under the age of 30 was on hand to provide their two cents on Coppola’s directing choices, the young stars playing dress up or the film’s bouncy contemporary soundtrack that includes everyone from Gang of Four to The Strokes. Where had all the young folks gone?
Since then, I have repeatedly returned to Lincoln Center for screenings at both the festival and Film Society of Lincoln Center programs, and I continue to feel like a party crasher at a posh retirement home.
Part of that is to be expected when I show up in my shlubby jeans and T-shirt at the rarefied cultural institution. Part of the New York Film Festival (NYFF) “event feel” comes from the imposing, nigh-unapproachable atmosphere at the Walter Reade, the fest’s and Film Society’s usual venue. An unnatural quiet settles over the single auditorium, one reinforced by the theater’s traditionally older audience. Blue-haired ladies are quick to shoot a withering glance at anyone who dares to interrupt the cold pallor of the place.
The Film Society was founded in 1969 and nearly 20 years later, it continues to offer access to some of the most important cinema to anyone in the city. But it often seems to appeal to a decidedly mature audience. They showed up in full force during a recent salute to film legend William Holden; they filled the seats for back-to-back screenings of Carol Reed’s The Key (1958) and George Seaton’s The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). Spotting a kindred pedant still worried about zits and getting laid would have been an act of high treason. A recent retro of Japanese anime master Satoshi Kon, however, did produce some audible laughter and sucking-in-of-teeth by an atypical mix of young otakus and a handful of older audience members. But, then again, there were miserably few people in attendance.
I started to hate on my generation’s lack of interest in highbrow cinema and their unwillingness to travel above 14th Street until I took a closer look at NYFF’s programming choices. This year’s lineup is particularly disheartening. Not one film stands out. Opening night kicks off September 26 with Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet’s The Class. Yawn. Then there’s the triumvirate of Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux. All of them are sure bets—but they will also arrive soon enough in the city’s cineplexes and won’t inspire anyone on a limited budget to fork over $16 during the fest.
The most excitement I can muster is for the films in the comprehensive Nagisa Oshima retrospective, the “Views from the Avant-Garde” section and an eclectic mix of titles in the Spotlight Retrospectives. Most of the others have already screened at the “Big Four” fests—Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice—and many already have studio distribution, assuring their eventual NYC screen time.
When I first began attending the festival in 2006, I was positively giddy that auteurs like Joon-ho Bong, Jonny to and Apichatpong Weerasethakul were getting their due. I even lined up for Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Midnight screenings were a must, so I wouldn’t miss Bong’s The Host. And I tricked my older sister into going with me to Kon’s Paprika by telling her it was a birthday present. My friend Jonah Moulin (probably the most erudite filmgoer I know around my age) made me begin to reconsider my investment when he told me not to be so impatient and waste my hard-earned cash since most of the films have distribution and would be around soon enough. He and many others are reluctant to risk their money on an unfamiliar film associated with Lincoln Center and are more likely to attend events at MoMA and Film Forum that provide year-round repertory and contemporary film programs because they’re much more adventurous and diverse.
Now, because of the festival’s anemic stats of exclusive films and the elitist trappings, I have begun to wonder: Who is the New York Film Festival—the city’s most prestigious film fest—really for? And does it even need to exist?
Young Blood at the Film Society
Though no one dares question its rasion d’etre, the NYFF’s exclusive atmosphere does put off many potential young filmgoers. One former member of the selection committee for both the Gen Art Film Festival and the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund (who wished to remain anonymous), told me recently that she felt the Film Society and NYFF both have their strengths but don’t cater to anyone but their already established audience.
“They’re not really geared towards film fans, they’re more geared towards the film industry,” she explained. “They’re less about the audience and more about people already in the industry.”
Though they don’t normally see eye-to-eye on films and film criticism, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov, hosts of the “House Next Door at Grassroots (Tavern)” podcast, both agree that, while the NYFF is perfect for a critic, it’s not an ideal place for a filmgoer.
“NYFF is nothing more than a carnival for film critics to come together and plan out the next 11 months for features and essays,” said Lichman. “There’s no reason for a casual film crowd to go to the Festival. It’s meant wholly for people who have been unwittingly enamored and seduced by film.”
Rizov seconded that idea, explaining, “I’m not sure how crazy I’d be about it if I had to go to everything as part of the general public…[NYFF] programming is great. I mean, really great. Not only do they bring the obvious festival heavy-hitters, they do wonderful things like programming In the City Sylvia last year. But those tickets are expensive…and the assigned seating gives it an ‘event’ feel I’m not crazy about…I wish it were a little more low-key.”
Many younger film critics and audience members expressed similar feelings that the Film Society does not do much to attract younger audiences. “They’re not really out to get us [younger audiences], so it doesn’t really draw us in,” said the GenArt member. But that feeling was also expressed eloquently by critic/former festival programmer Phillip Lopate in his 2007 Newsweek piece, “Leave the New York Film Festival Alone!” Although he was cautiously optimistic in tone, one sentence in particular stands out from the rest: “The threat of the sclerotic and the predictable, in tandem with an aging demographic base, hovers around the New York Film Festival, as it does over the entire Lincoln Center cultural complex.”
When I recently asked Lopate if he felt that that sentiment still applied, he told me that even if the festival is, “again getting younger,” it, like so many other institutions of fine arts, fears an eminent death.
“All higher arts face the fearful situation where they have to ask, ‘Is classical art going to be able to market itself to a younger audience? Is opera still going to?’…you know what I mean,” Lopate asked me, knowing that I did.
“My feeling is,” Lopate continued, “that cultural institutions should take a deep breath and do what they do best and not try to turn themselves inside out. From my point of view, for someone who’s no longer a young man, I’m happy for the New York Film Festival to continue to operate under this tradition and continue under these standards.”
Lopate’s argument that the festival needs to be comfortable doing what it does and damn the critics is an interesting one, especially considering how, whether justified or not, the Film Society looks to be giving into its fears of losing its young audience. The day before I talked with Lopate, Richard Peña, the director of NYFF, told me how glad he was that the FSLC had recently “expand[ed] in that particular audience.”
Though Lopate stressed the difference between the two entities, the NYFF not only preceded the Film Society by six years but also currently seems to share the same problems. Peña highlighted the success of Green Screens, a program initiated in February of 2008 that, according to its mission statement, “addresses through film the vital environmental concerns of global warming, the safety of our food supply, sustainable living, and more.”
I attended Green Screens this year and was as stunned to see graying hippies along with children under 10 pack the Walter Reade theater’s 268-seat auditorium for the evening’s screening of Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel. I was glad to see more backpacks than briefcases, but then the retribution began: my chair was kicked several times by kiddies before the screening even began. The usual somber quiet that characterizes the Film Society’s Walter Reade theater was absent, disturbed by children’s complaints and audible chatter. What’s worse, some scattered laughter at one of the new eco-friendly PSAs audibly proved that people were actually excited to be there.
I had to walk out. I didn’t know where I was.
Film as Art and Youth in 1963
Richard Roud, the first program director at the Film Society at Lincoln Center and festival organizer for the first NYFF in 1963, wrote in his introduction to the festival that it was originally intended “to present within a 10-day period a selection of the best films of the years—largely, but not exclusively—garnered from the major festivals.”
The difference between the 1963 festival and today’s may be numerically accentuated—a comparatively staggering 13 out of 21 films had not previously screened at the Big Four—but to understand that difference, one has to look at the shift in perception of film as art that took place between then and now.
Though Lincoln Center was founded only seven years before the first NYFF, by 1963 its prestige was enough to further advocate film as a legitimate form of art alongside the already established fine arts.
“It’s very hard for us to imagine the low status film was in at that point culturally,” says Peña, Roud’s successor. “I mean there were some exceptions—but by and large cinema wasn’t really seen as an art that you could really worthily compare to opera or ballet.”
The clout of such a budding prestigious cultural institution went a long way in impressing both critics and the public. Even the infamous Bosley Crowther was amazed that by the festival’s sixth day “all but four of the 13 showings that have been given in the 2,300-seat (Philharmonic) hall in the first six days of the 10-day series have been sold out, and attendance at the showings that weren’t sold out was close to capacity in every case.”
Peña stressed a feeling of continuity with that original intent. “I think the mission of the festival became to show the best of film, really show film at its most ambitious, at its best realized—in a way, film fulfilling it’s role as art,” Peña said. “It’s the kind of feeling I’ve tried to continue, to really demand of film that it be as ambitious as possible and in a certain way, see itself on a par with all the other arts.”
Realistically, that’s what NYFF is: a gala showcase for high-end art films that has no qualms about the elitist air it exudes. To preserve those high standards, the festival has changed very little since 1963, enforcing a strict set of standards. For instance, the festival is “not a marketplace,” according to Peña, and it’s regularly scheduled intentionally in late September/early October, months after three out of four of the Big Four have met.
The pressure to be like the Big Four has been tremendous for festival programmers, but for better or worse, they have weathered critical pressure and changed very little. In the past 46 years, the festival has not expanded its slate much—from 21 to 28 films in its main program—nor has it ever given out awards, though Peña sighed when he was asked about it, and said that there hasn’t been a year when someone didn’t propose the idea.
“There are so many competitive situations in the world,” Peña said. “I’m not sure why we have to apply those situations to art. I’d like to think that the winners are all the films selected and that once they’re in the program, I feel no need to distinguish between them.”
The unassailably chaste nature of the festival puts the burden of quality in the hands of festivalgoers. That task’s parameters, however, have changed significantly since 1969 with the expansion of the market for foreign and high-end art films. Further pronouncing the difference between how film as art is perceived then and now, an editorial in the New York Times from the first festival’s opening night presciently conjectured that, while inclusion in the festival does not “guarantee” quality, it does “give New Yorkers a chance to see what has been acclaimed at festivals abroad.”
Sustainable Cinema: Film Comment Selects Vs. New Directors/New Films
The Green Screens series may be a fledgling program at the Film Society, but it, like the annual Film Comment Selects program, is a welcome counterpoint to the majority of the retrospective and cultural repertory programs at Lincoln Center. And like the annual panel of programmers at NYFF, the program’s organizers have their own set of eclectic standards.
Put together by the writers of Lincoln Center’s own Film Comment magazine, Film Comment Selects serves up a welcome mix of high-end and genre films that touch upon issues and contemporary trends on which NYFF attendants miss out. While this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema program ignored the boom in French horror, Film Comment Selects sandwiched two French gorefests—Xavier Gens’ Frontière(s) and Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside—between two exemplary French art-films one would expect to see at NYFF: Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais and Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget.
Even New Directors/New Films, which is presented as one of Film Society’s three biggest events alongside NYFF, can’t boast the same thing. Like the Film Society, it suffers from the NYFF’s problem of solid but predictable programming. Though New Directors is supposed to announce a new crop of filmmakers, a similarly low number of them had not premiered at the Big Four and Sundance—signaling irrelevance.
Despite some of the dreary statistics and lackluster audience demographics, I’m optimistic about the Film Society’s future. Lincoln Center has been the site of new construction and the Film Society is one of the beneficiaries. The renovations to Alice Tully Hall may be the opportunity to expand and diversify that the Film Society and the NYFF needs.
The new facilities give the Film Society a more prominent place at Lincoln Center, putting the new Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center squarely on the south side of West 65th Street. A new LED marquee will announce the goings-on at the innovative, 150-seat theater, which is described on the Film Society’s website as a “new state-of-the-art film presentation and education complex.”
Lopate also believes that the Film Society could benefit from experimenting with venues and that this year may be a banner year for it to attract new audiences.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that the festival is being held at the Ziegfeld this year,” he said, commenting on the festival’s move to the 1,660-seat theater because of current renovations at Alice Tully Hall. It’s the first time the festival will be held in a commercial theater.
Of course, it remains unclear if anything of consequence will come of the new addition, but the feeling of optimism for the Film Society is palpable. Peña excitedly rattled off many ideas for now-pending programming.
“Right now we’re still at the stage where we’re figuring out not so much what to program but what we want the shape of it to be,” Peña said. “Should we do more runs of films, giving them one or two-week runs á la Film Forum? Do we do more repertory, more educational programs like ‘History of Film’ that shows classic films with a certain kind of frequency? Should we do more in-person appearances? So many different kinds of things we can do. I think through some planning and some eventual trial-and-error we can figure it out. That will be a major difference.”
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will continue to provide a much-needed alternative to multiplex fodder—and do it in fancy new digs. Who knows? While I don’t think that providing more History would bring in the young’ns, the new facility may be the catalyst Lincoln Center needs. I look forward to getting my chair kicked again at Lincoln Center. But for now, I’ll head to the Film Forum for that kind of action.
The auditorium was packed with notable mainstays of the New York critical establishment—like Rex Reed and William Wolf—but not one single “know-nothing” blogger or youthful upstart could be found. Nobody under the age of 30 was on hand to provide their two cents on Coppola’s directing choices, the young stars playing dress up or the film’s bouncy contemporary soundtrack that includes everyone from Gang of Four to The Strokes. Where had all the young folks gone?
Since then, I have repeatedly returned to Lincoln Center for screenings at both the festival and Film Society of Lincoln Center programs, and I continue to feel like a party crasher at a posh retirement home.
Part of that is to be expected when I show up in my shlubby jeans and T-shirt at the rarefied cultural institution. Part of the New York Film Festival (NYFF) “event feel” comes from the imposing, nigh-unapproachable atmosphere at the Walter Reade, the fest’s and Film Society’s usual venue. An unnatural quiet settles over the single auditorium, one reinforced by the theater’s traditionally older audience. Blue-haired ladies are quick to shoot a withering glance at anyone who dares to interrupt the cold pallor of the place.
The Film Society was founded in 1969 and nearly 20 years later, it continues to offer access to some of the most important cinema to anyone in the city. But it often seems to appeal to a decidedly mature audience. They showed up in full force during a recent salute to film legend William Holden; they filled the seats for back-to-back screenings of Carol Reed’s The Key (1958) and George Seaton’s The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). Spotting a kindred pedant still worried about zits and getting laid would have been an act of high treason. A recent retro of Japanese anime master Satoshi Kon, however, did produce some audible laughter and sucking-in-of-teeth by an atypical mix of young otakus and a handful of older audience members. But, then again, there were miserably few people in attendance.
I started to hate on my generation’s lack of interest in highbrow cinema and their unwillingness to travel above 14th Street until I took a closer look at NYFF’s programming choices. This year’s lineup is particularly disheartening. Not one film stands out. Opening night kicks off September 26 with Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet’s The Class. Yawn. Then there’s the triumvirate of Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux. All of them are sure bets—but they will also arrive soon enough in the city’s cineplexes and won’t inspire anyone on a limited budget to fork over $16 during the fest.
The most excitement I can muster is for the films in the comprehensive Nagisa Oshima retrospective, the “Views from the Avant-Garde” section and an eclectic mix of titles in the Spotlight Retrospectives. Most of the others have already screened at the “Big Four” fests—Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice—and many already have studio distribution, assuring their eventual NYC screen time.
When I first began attending the festival in 2006, I was positively giddy that auteurs like Joon-ho Bong, Jonny to and Apichatpong Weerasethakul were getting their due. I even lined up for Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Midnight screenings were a must, so I wouldn’t miss Bong’s The Host. And I tricked my older sister into going with me to Kon’s Paprika by telling her it was a birthday present. My friend Jonah Moulin (probably the most erudite filmgoer I know around my age) made me begin to reconsider my investment when he told me not to be so impatient and waste my hard-earned cash since most of the films have distribution and would be around soon enough. He and many others are reluctant to risk their money on an unfamiliar film associated with Lincoln Center and are more likely to attend events at MoMA and Film Forum that provide year-round repertory and contemporary film programs because they’re much more adventurous and diverse.
Now, because of the festival’s anemic stats of exclusive films and the elitist trappings, I have begun to wonder: Who is the New York Film Festival—the city’s most prestigious film fest—really for? And does it even need to exist?
Young Blood at the Film Society
Though no one dares question its rasion d’etre, the NYFF’s exclusive atmosphere does put off many potential young filmgoers. One former member of the selection committee for both the Gen Art Film Festival and the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund (who wished to remain anonymous), told me recently that she felt the Film Society and NYFF both have their strengths but don’t cater to anyone but their already established audience.
“They’re not really geared towards film fans, they’re more geared towards the film industry,” she explained. “They’re less about the audience and more about people already in the industry.”
Though they don’t normally see eye-to-eye on films and film criticism, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov, hosts of the “House Next Door at Grassroots (Tavern)” podcast, both agree that, while the NYFF is perfect for a critic, it’s not an ideal place for a filmgoer.
“NYFF is nothing more than a carnival for film critics to come together and plan out the next 11 months for features and essays,” said Lichman. “There’s no reason for a casual film crowd to go to the Festival. It’s meant wholly for people who have been unwittingly enamored and seduced by film.”
Rizov seconded that idea, explaining, “I’m not sure how crazy I’d be about it if I had to go to everything as part of the general public…[NYFF] programming is great. I mean, really great. Not only do they bring the obvious festival heavy-hitters, they do wonderful things like programming In the City Sylvia last year. But those tickets are expensive…and the assigned seating gives it an ‘event’ feel I’m not crazy about…I wish it were a little more low-key.”
Many younger film critics and audience members expressed similar feelings that the Film Society does not do much to attract younger audiences. “They’re not really out to get us [younger audiences], so it doesn’t really draw us in,” said the GenArt member. But that feeling was also expressed eloquently by critic/former festival programmer Phillip Lopate in his 2007 Newsweek piece, “Leave the New York Film Festival Alone!” Although he was cautiously optimistic in tone, one sentence in particular stands out from the rest: “The threat of the sclerotic and the predictable, in tandem with an aging demographic base, hovers around the New York Film Festival, as it does over the entire Lincoln Center cultural complex.”
When I recently asked Lopate if he felt that that sentiment still applied, he told me that even if the festival is, “again getting younger,” it, like so many other institutions of fine arts, fears an eminent death.
“All higher arts face the fearful situation where they have to ask, ‘Is classical art going to be able to market itself to a younger audience? Is opera still going to?’…you know what I mean,” Lopate asked me, knowing that I did.
“My feeling is,” Lopate continued, “that cultural institutions should take a deep breath and do what they do best and not try to turn themselves inside out. From my point of view, for someone who’s no longer a young man, I’m happy for the New York Film Festival to continue to operate under this tradition and continue under these standards.”
Lopate’s argument that the festival needs to be comfortable doing what it does and damn the critics is an interesting one, especially considering how, whether justified or not, the Film Society looks to be giving into its fears of losing its young audience. The day before I talked with Lopate, Richard Peña, the director of NYFF, told me how glad he was that the FSLC had recently “expand[ed] in that particular audience.”
Though Lopate stressed the difference between the two entities, the NYFF not only preceded the Film Society by six years but also currently seems to share the same problems. Peña highlighted the success of Green Screens, a program initiated in February of 2008 that, according to its mission statement, “addresses through film the vital environmental concerns of global warming, the safety of our food supply, sustainable living, and more.”
I attended Green Screens this year and was as stunned to see graying hippies along with children under 10 pack the Walter Reade theater’s 268-seat auditorium for the evening’s screening of Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel. I was glad to see more backpacks than briefcases, but then the retribution began: my chair was kicked several times by kiddies before the screening even began. The usual somber quiet that characterizes the Film Society’s Walter Reade theater was absent, disturbed by children’s complaints and audible chatter. What’s worse, some scattered laughter at one of the new eco-friendly PSAs audibly proved that people were actually excited to be there.
I had to walk out. I didn’t know where I was.
Film as Art and Youth in 1963
Richard Roud, the first program director at the Film Society at Lincoln Center and festival organizer for the first NYFF in 1963, wrote in his introduction to the festival that it was originally intended “to present within a 10-day period a selection of the best films of the years—largely, but not exclusively—garnered from the major festivals.”
The difference between the 1963 festival and today’s may be numerically accentuated—a comparatively staggering 13 out of 21 films had not previously screened at the Big Four—but to understand that difference, one has to look at the shift in perception of film as art that took place between then and now.
Though Lincoln Center was founded only seven years before the first NYFF, by 1963 its prestige was enough to further advocate film as a legitimate form of art alongside the already established fine arts.
“It’s very hard for us to imagine the low status film was in at that point culturally,” says Peña, Roud’s successor. “I mean there were some exceptions—but by and large cinema wasn’t really seen as an art that you could really worthily compare to opera or ballet.”
The clout of such a budding prestigious cultural institution went a long way in impressing both critics and the public. Even the infamous Bosley Crowther was amazed that by the festival’s sixth day “all but four of the 13 showings that have been given in the 2,300-seat (Philharmonic) hall in the first six days of the 10-day series have been sold out, and attendance at the showings that weren’t sold out was close to capacity in every case.”
Peña stressed a feeling of continuity with that original intent. “I think the mission of the festival became to show the best of film, really show film at its most ambitious, at its best realized—in a way, film fulfilling it’s role as art,” Peña said. “It’s the kind of feeling I’ve tried to continue, to really demand of film that it be as ambitious as possible and in a certain way, see itself on a par with all the other arts.”
Realistically, that’s what NYFF is: a gala showcase for high-end art films that has no qualms about the elitist air it exudes. To preserve those high standards, the festival has changed very little since 1963, enforcing a strict set of standards. For instance, the festival is “not a marketplace,” according to Peña, and it’s regularly scheduled intentionally in late September/early October, months after three out of four of the Big Four have met.
The pressure to be like the Big Four has been tremendous for festival programmers, but for better or worse, they have weathered critical pressure and changed very little. In the past 46 years, the festival has not expanded its slate much—from 21 to 28 films in its main program—nor has it ever given out awards, though Peña sighed when he was asked about it, and said that there hasn’t been a year when someone didn’t propose the idea.
“There are so many competitive situations in the world,” Peña said. “I’m not sure why we have to apply those situations to art. I’d like to think that the winners are all the films selected and that once they’re in the program, I feel no need to distinguish between them.”
The unassailably chaste nature of the festival puts the burden of quality in the hands of festivalgoers. That task’s parameters, however, have changed significantly since 1969 with the expansion of the market for foreign and high-end art films. Further pronouncing the difference between how film as art is perceived then and now, an editorial in the New York Times from the first festival’s opening night presciently conjectured that, while inclusion in the festival does not “guarantee” quality, it does “give New Yorkers a chance to see what has been acclaimed at festivals abroad.”
Sustainable Cinema: Film Comment Selects Vs. New Directors/New Films
The Green Screens series may be a fledgling program at the Film Society, but it, like the annual Film Comment Selects program, is a welcome counterpoint to the majority of the retrospective and cultural repertory programs at Lincoln Center. And like the annual panel of programmers at NYFF, the program’s organizers have their own set of eclectic standards.
Put together by the writers of Lincoln Center’s own Film Comment magazine, Film Comment Selects serves up a welcome mix of high-end and genre films that touch upon issues and contemporary trends on which NYFF attendants miss out. While this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema program ignored the boom in French horror, Film Comment Selects sandwiched two French gorefests—Xavier Gens’ Frontière(s) and Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside—between two exemplary French art-films one would expect to see at NYFF: Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais and Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget.
Even New Directors/New Films, which is presented as one of Film Society’s three biggest events alongside NYFF, can’t boast the same thing. Like the Film Society, it suffers from the NYFF’s problem of solid but predictable programming. Though New Directors is supposed to announce a new crop of filmmakers, a similarly low number of them had not premiered at the Big Four and Sundance—signaling irrelevance.
Despite some of the dreary statistics and lackluster audience demographics, I’m optimistic about the Film Society’s future. Lincoln Center has been the site of new construction and the Film Society is one of the beneficiaries. The renovations to Alice Tully Hall may be the opportunity to expand and diversify that the Film Society and the NYFF needs.
The new facilities give the Film Society a more prominent place at Lincoln Center, putting the new Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center squarely on the south side of West 65th Street. A new LED marquee will announce the goings-on at the innovative, 150-seat theater, which is described on the Film Society’s website as a “new state-of-the-art film presentation and education complex.”
Lopate also believes that the Film Society could benefit from experimenting with venues and that this year may be a banner year for it to attract new audiences.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that the festival is being held at the Ziegfeld this year,” he said, commenting on the festival’s move to the 1,660-seat theater because of current renovations at Alice Tully Hall. It’s the first time the festival will be held in a commercial theater.
Of course, it remains unclear if anything of consequence will come of the new addition, but the feeling of optimism for the Film Society is palpable. Peña excitedly rattled off many ideas for now-pending programming.
“Right now we’re still at the stage where we’re figuring out not so much what to program but what we want the shape of it to be,” Peña said. “Should we do more runs of films, giving them one or two-week runs á la Film Forum? Do we do more repertory, more educational programs like ‘History of Film’ that shows classic films with a certain kind of frequency? Should we do more in-person appearances? So many different kinds of things we can do. I think through some planning and some eventual trial-and-error we can figure it out. That will be a major difference.”
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will continue to provide a much-needed alternative to multiplex fodder—and do it in fancy new digs. Who knows? While I don’t think that providing more History would bring in the young’ns, the new facility may be the catalyst Lincoln Center needs. I look forward to getting my chair kicked again at Lincoln Center. But for now, I’ll head to the Film Forum for that kind of action.
