A Theater Near You

The tradition of informed and discerning—but also occasionally frisky and risky—curation runs deep in New York, and with A Theater Near You, former Museum of the Moving Image chief film curator David Schwartz has put together a series for the Museum of Modern Art that pays tribute to seventeen “iconic screening venues—some long gone, some still thriving today.”

It’s only natural that the first in line is MoMA itself. Under curator Iris Barry and assistant curator Jay Leyda, the Museum began screening films in its own theater in 1939. As representative of Barry and Leyda’s predilections, Schwartz has selected Vsevolod Pudovkin’s short comedy Chess Fever (1925) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) as Thursday evening’s opening night presentation. When Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner put together his Criterion Top 10, he put The Last Command at the top of it, noting that the silent classic offers “pure visual storytelling and an incredible performance by Emil Jannings as a Russian general who finds work as an extra in Hollywood.”

MoMA’s chief preservationist Peter Williamson oversaw the restoration of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) in the 1980s. “Conceptually it’s incredible,” MoMA film curator Dave Kehr told R. Emmet Sweeney in 2011. “Multiple planes, multiple focal points. A lot of the stuff people think Welles and Tati invented is already pretty much there in The Big Trail.”

Opened in 1931 as a 299-seat cinema on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Thalia Theater was run by Martin Lewis from 1938 until his death in 1955, when his widow, Ursula Lewis took over and ran it until 1973. In his program notes, Schwartz quotes writer Lillian Ross recalling that she and New Yorker editor William Shawn “went there repeatedly to see Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game [1939]. We must have seen it there about fifteen times.”

In 2015, Wallace Shawn, son of William, told André Gregory that he “first saw The Rules of the Game around fifty years ago, and I saw it again quite recently. Apparently I’m the same person I used to be, because I still felt that everything in the world is in that film, and I’m inside of it myself somehow.”

In 1976, Richard Schwarz revived the Thalia as a repertory theater, and Schwartz notes that he programmed “an exhilarating mix of international classics, American B-movies, cartoon programs, first-run premieres of films no other New York theaters would exhibit (such as Jerry Lewis’s Smorgasbord), and his favorite genre, film noir.” And as J. Hoberman wrote in 2011, “noir veers into apocalyptic sci-fi in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly, which, briefly described, tracks one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most bru­tal detectives in American movies through a nocturnal, inexplicably violent labyrinth to a white-hot vision of cosmic annihilation.”

As a salute to Amos and Marcia Vogel, who founded the immensely popular and influential film society Cinema 16 in 1947, MoMA will screen Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) flanked by two shorts, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949). Vampyr is “as close as you get to a poem in film,” says Guillermo del Toro. “The camera becomes a character in the film. It’s more than a witness, it’s an active participant in the narrative, and therefore it’s deeply cinematic.”

Cinema 16 opened its 1961 season with Nagisa Oshima’s The Sun’s Burial (1960), “ribald with sex and violence,” as MUBI’s Daniel Kasman described it in 2008, “brashly styled in the artificial colors of manga and neon (nearly half a decade before Jean-Luc Godard took up the look of advertisements and comic books) but shot in the real slums with nothing but the sticky faces of our jobless, our petty yakuza, our youngsters with nowhere else to go, our cagey women, all these pacing faces of grime and disquietude to keep the frame moving, the movie moving, the characters moving, the country moving—and politics churning in this pulp genre like mad.”

“Dan Talbot was perhaps the single most influential figure in New York film culture,” writes Schwartz in a piece for MoMA’s Magazine, “both as an exhibitor (his theaters included the Lincoln Plaza, Cinema Studio, and the Metro) and as a distributor (his company New Yorker Films introduced countless international directors to American audiences).” Talbot and his wife, Toby, opened the New Yorker Theater April 7, 1960 with a double feature: Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank’s Beat classic Pull My Daisy (1959) and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

In 1973, the Talbots hosted the local premiere of Tokyo Story (1953), which the late David Bordwell called “a generous introduction to [Yasujiro Ozu’s] distinct world. It contains in miniature a great many of the qualities that enchant his admirers and move audiences to tears.”

Infused as it is with a 1960s-era avant-garde vibe, Anthology Film Archives didn’t actually open its doors until 1970. Head of programming Jed Rapfogel has put together a program of shorts, Imageless Films and Motion(Less) Pictures, ranging chronologically from Dwinell Grant’s Color Sequence (1943) to Scott Stark’s Angel Beach (2001). MoMA will also screen Anthology’s 2018 restoration of The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, a New York-set feature that director Ron Rice left unfinished when he died in 1964. Lead performer and collaborator Taylor Mead edited and scored a final version in 1981.

Mead also stars in Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960), which will screen with Rice’s 1961 short Senseless as a nod to the Charles Theater. Writing in the Village Voice in 2018, Bilge Ebiri noted that The Flower Thief was “heavily influenced” by Pull My Daisy and “follows the picaresque wanderings of innocent drifter Mead around North Beach [in San Francisco], as he gets in a variety of scrapes that blend the surreal with the Chaplinesque. The film’s ‘incidents’ (if we may even call them that) are undercut by Rice’s freewheeling editing and camerawork, as well as Mead’s playfully self-aware performance.”

During the more than fifty years that Karen Cooper ran Film Forum—1972 to 2023—she hosted U.S. premieres of films by Chantal Akerman, Jennie Livingston, Terry Zwigoff, Julie Dash, and Chris Marker, whose Sans Soleil (1983) will screen on Friday and Tuesday. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Marker’s film “his testament and his masterpiece,” a “cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.”

The signature moviegoing phenomenon of the 1970s was the midnight movie, an idea hatched by Elgin Theater owner Ben Barenholz. Howard Hampton has observed that John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), which ran for more than a year, “burrows into the psyche in a backhanded way that justifies Jonas Mekas’s hyperbole in a quote featured on the original posters: ‘Ten times more interesting than Last Tango in Paris.’”

Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) ran even longer, from October 1974 until March 1977, when the Elgin shut down. Schwartz quotes Elgin manager Chuck Zlatkin: “It has reggae music. It makes a political statement, it gives a realistic look into another culture. It’s not the Jamaica you see in travel brochures. And it’s basically done like an old James Cagney film.”

Sid Geffen and filmmaker Jackie Raynal had been running the Bleecker Street Cinema since 1974 when, in 1977, they invited critic Serge Daney to present a weeklong program of films championed by Cahiers du cinéma. One of his selections was Jean-Luc Godard’s Numéro deux (1975).

“A rumination on politics and sex, bodies and machines, men and women, Numéro deux plays out at a Brechtian distance, on screens within the screen,” wrote Dennis Lim for the Los Angeles Times in 2012. “Within the flashing, constantly morphing text that appears on screen in Numéro deux can be found a blunt summation of Godard’s larger project: At one point the word ‘politics’ changes to ‘history,’ which in turn becomes ‘cinema.’”

The Bleecker Street Cinema opened Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980), in 1981. When Film at Lincoln Center screened it in 2014, the programmers wrote: “For all its youthful self-seriousness (or maybe in part because of it), Permanent Vacation is a touching vision of what it was like to be head over heels with art, love, and oneself in late-1970s New York.”

In 1982, Fabiano Canosa, who oversaw repertory programming at the Public Theater from 1978 to 1995, put together a series, Wings of the Right, spotlighting Hollywood’s responses to conservative movements throughout its history. The series opened with Gregory LaCava’s Gabriel over the White House (1933).

Writing for Film Comment in 2012, J. Hoberman tells the borderline unbelievable story of the film’s making—propelled by William Randolph Hearst’s urge to telegraph a message to the incoming president, FDR. MPAA Code enforcer Will Hayes and MGM chairman Nicholas Schenck were horrified by the first cut, and ultimately, alternate versions were shot. Gabriel “may have been, as Variety put it, ‘voluptuously patriotic,’” wrote Hoberman, “but for all its insane hero worship, fevered nationalism, and incantatory ressentiment, it was scarcely the last word in cinematic fascism.”

When Film Forum moved to West Houston Street in 1990, Bruce Goldstein launched the new repertory screen with Preston Sturges’s 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels. “The lesson of Sturges’s peculiar gospel may ultimately be the communion of all humanity in the need for laughter,” writes Stuart Klawans, “but by the time you reach this revelation, you have witnessed one of the most striking and conscience-laden episodes of social realism in classic American cinema.”

An offshoot of the annual New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center began screening films year-round in 1991. Program director Richard Peña teamed up with Mahen Bonetti, the founder of the New York African Film Festival, to present a first edition that opened with Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar (1992). Roger Ebert called it “a film that tells a simple story and yet touches on some of the most difficult questions of our time.”

In 1992, when Schwartz was still at MoMI, he put together a complete David Cronenberg retrospective. Cronenberg’s twenty-three-minute television drama The Italian Machine (1976) will screen on a double bill with Videodrome (1983), which Olivier Assayas calls “one of his masterpieces. When it was released, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe a filmmaker could have not just captured the very soul of our present, or its hidden meaning, but also found its poetry, the mysterious beauty of it.”

BAMcinématek, established in 1998 and currently programmed by Jesse Trussell, hosted a Spike Lee retrospective in 1999. Crooklyn (1994) is “Lee’s contribution to a rich cinematic subgenre, the autobiographical memory film,” writes Ben Sachs for Cine-File. The film is also “as vivid a depiction of poverty as you’ll find in mainstream American cinema of the 1990s.”

Kazembe Balagun, the executive director of the Maysles Documentary Center, which was founded in 2005, will be on hand to discuss a program of shorts that opens with Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Meet Marlon Brando (1966). In 2016, the Center hosted an exclusive run of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro before it opened wide a few months later. “By arranging U.S. history as entirely tainted and polluted by the cancerous stench of racism,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant, “I Am Not Your Negro makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.”

One of MoMI’s signature programs, First Look, was launched in 2012, and the inaugural edition opened with Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly (2011). It’s “less an adaptation” of Joseph Conrad’s first novel “than a loose, dream-like reimagining of its central conflict between a European man, his Asian wife, and their mixed-race daughter,” wrote Darren Hughes when he interviewed Akerman for Notebook in 2011. “Like Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which foregrounds the racist assumptions in Jane Eyre by giving life and a history to Charlotte Bronte’s exotic ‘madwoman in the attic,’ Akerman rebalances the weight of Conrad’s narrative and in doing so finds—surprisingly, perhaps—more sympathy for everyone involved.”

Thomas Beard and Ed Halter opened Light Industry in 2008, and in 2013, they presented a marathon program, The American Serial: 1914–1944, a celebration of what they noted was “one of the precursors to television’s episodic programming.” MoMA will screen five hours of the original twelve-hour program—“a breakneck recapitulation of Hollywood history”—with all episodes screening from 16 mm prints. In 2009, Light Industry guest programmer Ginger Brooks Takahashi presented Ulrike Ottinger’s eight-hour Taiga (1992), a portrait of Mongolian nomads, and MoMA will screen a new restoration—with two intermissions.

35 Shots of Rum (2008) was a highlight of BAM’s 2019 retrospective Strange Desires: The Films of Claire Denis. “An homage to both Yasujiro Ozu’s similarly themed Late Spring (1949) and her own mother’s relationship with her grandfather,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2009, “35 Shots is Denis’s warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two’s extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.”

Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) will screen in recognition of the work done by the FLC programming team led by Florence Almozini since 2022. As noted last summer, Godard called Adieu Philippine “quite simply the best French film of recent years,” and François Truffaut found in Rozier’s style “something of genius in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality that confers sufficient importance on them to fascinate us.”

The Film Desk founder Jake Perlin began programming full-time for L’Alliance New York just last year. Two shorts, Florence Miailhe’s Papillon (2024) and Samba Félix Ndiaye’s Agua (1989) will precede Claude Sautet’s 1980 feature A Bad Son, starring Patrick Dewaere as a recovering addict returning to Paris after serving a five-year sentence in the U.S.

A Theater Near You will wrap on July 11 with a salute to Spectacle, the microcinema founded in 2010 and now run by around fifty volunteers. MoMA will screen a sampling of Spectacle’s self-made trailers and American Hunter, which Schwartz calls “the 1988 schlock sensation starring Chris Mitchum (son of Robert) and directed by the Indonesian action auteur known simply as Arizal. Originally shown at Spectacle on low-quality video in 2012, the film will be shown here in the only known 35 mm print, imported from Switzerland for this screening.”