Advice to Moviegoers

by Amos Vogel

Each year, the excitement felt by our New York Film Festival Program Committee when we discover a new talent is immediately accompanied by a feeling of apprehension. It is a familiar dilemma. A new talent is exhilarating because it reflects the vitality of the medium. It is sobering because so many of these new directors do not find their way into American theaters, or else experience, even if they do, great difficulties at the box office.

A combination of factors militate against them; first, it has be come extremely expensive to release films as costs of advertising, publicity, theater rentals have increased exorbitantly: secondly. the number of theaters available is restricted by new distribution patterns such as ‘showcase’ presentations (one film exhibited simultaneously in many theaters), ‘roadshows’ (one film tying up a particular theater for many months) and by the entrance of major companies into the foreign film market, their preference for large, exploitable films, and their taking over theaters exclusively for their own company’s product.

The third problem is the prevalence of a critical fraternity partly still oriented toward a cinematic past no longer representative of the thematic or esthetic preoccupations of the new film makers. We thus have the piquant spectacle of certain critics chastising the artists for ‘not making films the way they used to’ (nice, clear plots, straight forward exposition, solid characterizations, recognizable and acceptable messages). Not all reviewers who feel this way have the courage to abandon film criticism altogether as a well-known critic did when he realized that the contemporary cinema operated on a wavelength different from his own.

Despite effusive curtsies to film as art in the press and the cocktail parties, we are still a frontier society when it comes to accepting film as one of the greatest civilizing (or brutalizing) forces of the century. Our mass media, in their eternal levelling of all reality to manageable trivialities, not merely emasculate the Vietnam news by surrounding it with cereal advertisements, but also compel their film reviewers to give more space and anguished attention to fatuous multi-million dollar productions than to the sublime, poverty-stricken films of a Robert Bresson, whose oeuvre is on a level of quality comparable to that of great art.

Until this cultural barbarism is recognized for what it is, we will have no significant improvements in the situation; and the New York Film Festival, similar to the repertory theaters and a few exceptional critics, will serve merely as a ‘witness.’

A number of forward-looking individuals and companies in the field have begun to explore new kinds of distribution anti exhibition methods to help change this situation. In book publishing it is entirely possible, next to the huge bestsellers, to publish works appealing to more specialized sensibilities. But where an edition of 5,000 hard-cover copies is quite respectable for serious literary works, in the cinema a minimum of half a million spectators are required to lift a medium budget film from the loss category. This untenable situation is currently under attack by a new breed of distributor. Janus Films and others bypass the conventional theaters and premiere new films on the profitable national college circuit; book publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Grove Press become film distributors to this same university market; Aspen Magazine and Evergreen Review make 8mm avant-garde films available to their subscribers; cable television may open the prospect of more selective home programming; and the new video home recorders that copy TV programs theoretically permit one to add thousands of feature films to one’s private film library. And so the day is coming when – just as we can pick up a Dostoevsky novel for 85c at the nearest drugstore – we will be able to purchase a Fellini feature and play it back at leisure through our television set.

Until then, is there anything you can do to help this situation? You cannot resolve the basic problem but the following are small steps in the right direction:

1) Acquaint yourself with the international film scene by reading the domestic and foreign magazines now generally available.

2) Use your new knowledge to help inform the critics of new films, directors or trends abroad: with certain exceptions they do not have the time to read in this field. Too overburdened with the massive onslaught of commercial mediocrities they must review, they cannot cope with unreleased films or new developments abroad, and act largely as passive recipients (‘consumers’) of what the commercial distributors here choose to set before them.

3) During their very first week, attend as many of the interesting-sounding new films (especially the less promoted ones) as you possibly can, encouraging your friends to do likewise, The costs and intricacies of art theater operation are such that unless those interested in a particular film rush to see it during its first week, its run will be terminated.

4) Do not allow the critics to see films ‘for you’ as so many of us do unconsciously. Instead use them, after having seen a film, to check your views against or derive new insights from; some of the critics are invaluable for this.

5) Go out of your way to frequent such theaters as the New Yorker, the Bleecker Street, Thalia, Evergreen, Elgin, York, New Cinema Playhouse, Cinematheque and the other repertory theaters; they need and deserve your support.

6) Continue to support the Rugoff, Reade, Translux chains and the many other regular cinemas that have brought you an endless number of outstanding films over the years.

7) If you have money to spare, start your own distribution or exhibition business, concentrating on the kind of films mentioned here. You may not grow rich but you will have fun in a good cause.

8) Discriminate in favor of the New York Film Festival and similar endeavors: actively play down what you dislike and accentuate the positive in your movie-going habits: remember that your ticket is a ballot, counted by the moguls to determine future policy. Amidst all the powerful, negative influences that suffocate us, these half-way pure, relatively uncorrupted films, these courageous projects and showcases are hesitant signposts of a better future. Where would we be without them?

Lincoln Center Journal, September 1968