A Screen of One’s Own: Celebrating Artist-Run Cinemas Around the World

Linklater was just starting out as a filmmaker when he began screening while studying in Austin, and the earliest exhibition space was part of the creative ground that helped inspire his work. “My first couple of films just grew out of the film society in a way,” he said, remembering casting for Slacker through the coffee shop. But he recalls one late night working on production for Slacker while also trying to book another season of screenings, and realizing it was . . . a lot. Help was needed, and the organization grew, expanding into premieres and tributes (starting with James Benning) while continuing its repertory programming.

Even as he became an increasingly acclaimed and prolific director, Linklater did not leave the AFS behind: “My world shifted a little bit, but the film programming side has never not been a part of my life.” Today Linklater keeps on trucking at the AFS as creative director, programming a popular series of underappreciated ’80s movies called “Jewels in the Wasteland.” He has regular conversations with AFS creative head Holly Herrick and programmer Lars Nilsen “about what’s out there, what kind of series are coming up, what new prints are going on.” Recent and upcoming screenings include the traveling Wong Kar Wai retrospective and a run of Leos Carax’s Annette, as well as a restoration of the 1976 Austin documentary Heartworn Highways and Boyz n the Hood. The AFS mix of new releases and repertory selections very much responds to the needs of audiences in today’s particular exhibition landscape, where a consistently adventurous slate in a theater is not a given. For comparison, when I asked Linklater whether, in the 1980s, he was also showing new indies like Stranger Than Paradise alongside repertory, he said he didn’t need to because it was showing down the street.

While today clearly an avid cinephile who keeps up with the latest cinema from home and abroad, Huppert says she did not grow up with a habit of frequent moviegoing: “I have to confess to you, I wasn’t raised in Paris. I was raised in the outskirts. There was no cinema around where I lived. No movie theaters at all!” That was then, though—now, when I ask if she has any favorite theaters outside Paris, the actor reels off several in New York: the Paris Theater, the Angelika, Metrograph, and “the cinema run by Dan Talbot” (the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, shuttered and still awaiting revival). Los Angeles, too, came up when I asked about seeing her own movies with an audience: “I like the cinema she goes to in Quentin’s movie [Westwood Village Theatre, which Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate visits in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood].” (Tarantino, of course, has his own theaters, in Los Angeles: the New Beverly Cinema, plus another recent acquisition, the Vista Theatre on Sunset Boulevard.)

Huppert singled out the Paris Theater with a story that underlined for me how cinemas are generative—not only a living part of film culture but also an inspiration for more art. “I am so happy that the Paris Theater is not going to be replaced by a supermarket, because this is where Michael Cimino saw me and decided he would hire me on Heaven’s Gate,” she said. “He saw Violette [1978, Chabrol] there. He always said he saw like ten minutes. It’s probably true, because Michael was always in a hurry.” The scene in question is the one in which Violette, a young prostitute played by a teenage Huppert, is arrested in the park. “He went back to the office and said, okay, I found my actress.” The rest, as they say, is history, and now the future of the Huppert-blessed cinemas feels bright with a reported influx of young audiences.

Movie theaters always need their supporters, as the global litany of gone-but-not-forgotten establishments can attest. And while researching this article, I was sad to learn that a Taipei space I had long dreamt of visiting was no longer open: Director Tsai’s Cafe Galerie. The “director Tsai” is of course Tsai Ming-liang, who created one of cinema’s most gorgeous and visceral meditations on moviegoing and movie houses with Goodbye, Dragon Inn. I was told that Tsai still does organize screenings, these days to promote his solo exhibition, Walker, at the Zhuangwei Dune Visitor Area in Yilan. (An official Taiwan tourism website teases the combination landscape/architectural site as featuring a “sand-dune exhibition center” curated by Tsai.) But in the original eighteen-seat Cafe Galerie space in Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall, from 2011 to 2014, Tsai showed a range of movies including Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Singin’ in the Rain, Ikiru, Gaslight, and the Ming dynasty musical The Kingdom and the Beauty.

One of the most singular and vital voices in cinema, Tsai seeks out same when he has the occasion to show films: “The common feature of these movies is that they all have a great director, and each has its own style,” the director of Days told me in an email. Tsai described growing up in Malaysia seeing generally commercial films, until he came to Taiwan and saw French New Wave and new German films. His inspiration—evoking the fascination shown for the world within a world that is Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s theater space—seems to extend to the moviegoing itself: “I especially like to share my experience of watching movies.”

Tsai does maintain another relevant business pursuit that I had also filed away after hearing about it years ago: his own brand of coffee. The conversation quickly became experiential once again, as Tsai drew a lovely parallel between his movie viewing and his coffee intake, observing how international influences commingled over time. As Tsai explained, Malaysia was once colonized by the British, leaving behind a lot of Western eating habits. “Coffee is one of them,” Tsai said. “I was drinking it with sugar and condensed milk when I went to study in Taiwan.” That practice changed for him in a city where many were influenced by Japanese culture in their taste for coffee. “This phenomenon is a bit like my experience of watching movies.” And so in both his films and his film exhibition, Tsai returns again and again to how cultural memory and legacy intertwine, across space and time, and sometimes within the same space. (You can still buy bags of the coffee with his and Lee Kang-sheng’s heads drawn on them. David Lynch, eat your heart out.)

There are a few other cinemas and spaces affiliated with a filmmaker, including another Taiwanese great, Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose SPOT—Taipei Film House features screenings of new art-house movies and regional releases, a bookstore, and more, in a landmark building that was formerly the U.S. ambassador’s residence. And forthcoming in Los Angeles is the AMANDA Cinema, a project of Ava DuVernay’s influential ARRAY company. (Details about its opening date and programming were not available at press time.)

But like all such endeavors, these cinemas are also institutions that outlive any one person. The Maysles Documentary Center was cofounded in 2008 by cinema verité godhead Albert Maysles, who died in 2015, in two Harlem townhouses, featuring both regular screenings and educational initiatives including a filmmaking workshop. Never exclusively focused on nonfiction, the earliest programming included assorted documentary classics and deep cuts but also a New York series that featured Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Michael Campus’s The Education of Sonny Carson, and Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity and, later, theatrical runs including Hong Sangsoo (before he was getting airtime at prestige cinemas).

When I spoke to Albert Maysles at the time of the theater’s opening in 2008, his inspiration was simple: he’d moved from the Dakota on the Upper West Side and, upon seeing the raw space of his new home, he thought, “Let’s show movies!” The zeal for programming has continued to this day, pushing past the extraordinary pressures of the pandemic with often experimental verve: a recent program was cheekily titled, as if in defiance, “Cinemas, In Memoriam.” Curated by Emily Apter, Anne Horner, and Inney Prakash, the “In Memoriam” program offers meditations on the cinema space and a kind of “solace” amid turmoil: from New York cuts such as Rudolph Burckhardt’s Square Times and Sodom and Gomorrah and Newsreel’s The Case Against Lincoln Center, to Anand Patwardhan’s Occupation: Mill Worker, Anja Salomonowitz’s Carmen, and a recent Korean film called Glow Job.

Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles, belongs to the theater’s new generation, having never even met Albert Maysles. He started at the theater just before the pandemic, a Detroit transplant to New York. “Our number-one priority is serving our community,” he said. “So we’re thinking about films and histories that are pertinent and interesting and valuable to Harlem residents.” That’s a commitment that dates back to one of the foundational screenings of the Maysles, initiated by a neighbor knocking on the window. While still planning for theatrical screenings, the Maysles has kept the community spirit alive this year with sidewalk screenings and virtual cinema offerings.