Film as a Subversive Art - with Amos Vogel

From Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (2003)
An hour-long filmed profile of Amos Vogel, 82-year old New York resident and Austrian emigre, founder of the New York Film Festival and America's most important film society, Cinema 16.


From The Sticking Place, www.thestickingplace.com

And some others' opinions on Vogel:

"Vogel's New York–based Cinema 16 boasted thousands of members during its existence in the '40s and '50s, long before the rise of film festivals and art houses. His provocative, even controversial, programming combined films by respected auteurs with experimental and political fare. In the '60s, Vogel took this spirit to the new Lincoln Center by helping found the New York Film Festival, and in 1975 published his seminal tome Film as a Subversive Art, a book he calls "the culmination of the efforts of a lifetime."

Part movie guide, part philosophical treatise, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes and champions works that challenge viewers and thereby precipitate new ways of seeing society and existence. For Vogel, films could provide more than mere entertainment; intelligent programming could be a means of consciousness-raising; he screened "anything that made people question an existing value system, that opened up people's minds to other possibilities," Vogel tells the Voice. "The aesthetic and the political have always been joined. To me the avant-garde, whether they knew it or not, was always part of a radical view of society and of the human psyche." "

" .Some sections bear the stigma of faded taboos – subversion, as Vogel himself acknowledges, remains a movable feast. For example, Vogel’s hopes for the ‘porno-political’ and what he calls ‘erotic realism’ look quaint, as does his lament at the lack of on-screen ejaculations. The book is certainly blotchy, partial, sometimes sententious. Nevertheless, Film as a Subversive Art, in this facsimile edition, now resembles nothing so much as an archaeological find. At the time it was presumably intended in part as a sourcebook for other programmers; now that independent (and particularly 16mm) film distribution and exhibition have been almost obliterated, it is a guide to an invisible city. Cinemas as subversive spaces, thriving on their suppressed sociality – places we go together to be alone, as Jean-Luc Godard, one of Vogel’s avatars, once put it – are in perhaps terminal decline; film has receded into an increasingly amorphous moving-image culture, in which viewing is more fundamentally solitary. Between the lines Vogel’s book is testament to a history of screenings and cinema-going as much as it is to the films themselves. While Vogel’s contemporary Manny Farber produced his best insights in microcosm, with his elegant decompositions of individual films, Film as a Subversive Art provides a kind of complementary aerial perspective: a scattergun survey of vanished filmic vistas."
Mike Sperlinger freize, Issue 94 October 2005
-Carnival of Anarchy