Anthology Film Archives
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Cinema name : Anthology Film Archives
Building name : Joseph Papp Public Theater Address : 425 Lafayette Street Neighborhood : Years of occupancy : 1970 - 1974 Screens (seats) : 1 (90) Active individuals : Jerome Hill (funder); Jonas Mekas (director); Peter Kubelka (designer) |
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Cinema name : Anthology Film Archives
Address : 32 2nd Avenue Neighborhood : East Village Years of occupancy : 1988 - present Screens (seats) : 1 (75) Active individuals : James Haller (archivist) |
The 'Invisible Cinema' and new approaches to filmmaking and exhibition
A great opportunity opened in 1970, just as the Filmmakers Cinematheque was in
fear of shutting down due to building department violations. Jerome Hill was a
great supporter of avant-garde filmmaking. He arranged a space for a cinema in
the Public Theater through a personal connection and paid their rent every year
until he died in 1974 (Robert Haller estimated this was around $150,000 a year; he
also gave Mekas an unlimited tab at a restaurant he owned – truly a dedicated
philanthropist!).
With their move to the Public Theater, the managing group of filmmakers officially created Anthology Film Archives as a screening space for their Essential Cinema repertory and an archive of original film. With Jerome Hill’s financial support, Kubelka designed the Invisible Cinema into their allotted space.
The screening room was entirely black with thick curtains and carpet to muffle sound. The space includes 90-120 seats (records differ) which are built with blinders on both sides and a hood that curves over each viewers seat. Talking during the film could get you kicked out, but it was nearly impossible to have any social interaction once seated. As Robert Haller describes, if you were on a date the most you could do was awkwardly hold hands under the hooded seat.
Kubelka described the cinema this way:
“The cinema is a black and silent room in which there are no noises or other sounds from the outside world. People go there at a certain time and they remain seated doing nothing else for two hours. This situation is the deepest and profoundest opportunity that we have in the whole world to approach the work of somebody in which we are interested. We are forced by circumstances to concentrate completely on one thing. All other media and especially the digital media can work everywhere else, they are part of the environment, they sponsor dissipation, and so the film event is the greatest situation of an encounter with somebody else’s thoughts.”
Experimental filmmakers went to Cinema 16 as their film school. But eventually they needed a more radical space to exhibit experimental artwork whose purpose was to bush the boundaries of film as medium, regardless of alienating a public audience. It wasn’t enough to have new cinematic art filter through Vogel’s perception, astute as it was, of what would appeal to even a non-mainstream society of film-lovers. In ironic fashion Anthology’s Essential Cinema collection of pre 1970 classic art films became restrictive for many of Mekas’s future audiences of filmmakers. In the 1970s a group of young artist from Binghamton college would form their own exhibition space, the Collective for the Living Cinema, to liberate film viewing from Mekas’ dogmatic cannon.
Following Hill's death the foundation created in his name pulled all support from filmmaking and Anthology Film Archives moved back to their space at 80 Wooster St.
With their move to the Public Theater, the managing group of filmmakers officially created Anthology Film Archives as a screening space for their Essential Cinema repertory and an archive of original film. With Jerome Hill’s financial support, Kubelka designed the Invisible Cinema into their allotted space.
The screening room was entirely black with thick curtains and carpet to muffle sound. The space includes 90-120 seats (records differ) which are built with blinders on both sides and a hood that curves over each viewers seat. Talking during the film could get you kicked out, but it was nearly impossible to have any social interaction once seated. As Robert Haller describes, if you were on a date the most you could do was awkwardly hold hands under the hooded seat.
Kubelka described the cinema this way:
“The cinema is a black and silent room in which there are no noises or other sounds from the outside world. People go there at a certain time and they remain seated doing nothing else for two hours. This situation is the deepest and profoundest opportunity that we have in the whole world to approach the work of somebody in which we are interested. We are forced by circumstances to concentrate completely on one thing. All other media and especially the digital media can work everywhere else, they are part of the environment, they sponsor dissipation, and so the film event is the greatest situation of an encounter with somebody else’s thoughts.”
Experimental filmmakers went to Cinema 16 as their film school. But eventually they needed a more radical space to exhibit experimental artwork whose purpose was to bush the boundaries of film as medium, regardless of alienating a public audience. It wasn’t enough to have new cinematic art filter through Vogel’s perception, astute as it was, of what would appeal to even a non-mainstream society of film-lovers. In ironic fashion Anthology’s Essential Cinema collection of pre 1970 classic art films became restrictive for many of Mekas’s future audiences of filmmakers. In the 1970s a group of young artist from Binghamton college would form their own exhibition space, the Collective for the Living Cinema, to liberate film viewing from Mekas’ dogmatic cannon.
Following Hill's death the foundation created in his name pulled all support from filmmaking and Anthology Film Archives moved back to their space at 80 Wooster St.
Quotes & Notes
Jerome Hill was called by this friend Martinson of the Martinson Coffee fame, they were in the army together, they became very good friends and when Martinson became the chairman of the Shakespeare Theatre, the Public Theater, on Lafayette Street, and began renovating the building for 25 Lafayette, he said there is some space here, maybe you want to do something, you know, for cinema. So Jerome called me and said, do you want to do something here? I said, why not? Good. But at the same time I was, what I was already planning since George, George, the first two buildings that George had acquired for the Cooperatives was 80 Wooster and there was another building on Greene Street practically on the corner of Canal Street. So I put, Jerome, actually, Hill, put the deposit monies on both buildings on the ground floors and basements. And the idea was since there was a dissatisfaction about my programming that 80 Wooster will remain very open, the way I had, and the Greene Street building will become Cinematheque 2 which will be like an academy of very selected, very selected, it won't be open very much. And it was at that time that Jerome called me and said, we have this space at 425 Lafayette. So, then I abandoned the Greene Street and took it and just went ahead at 425 Lafayette.
http://www.webofstories.com/play/jonas.mekas/91;jsessionid=4A96872F16CC8581E79620BF45ADB415
But fate had other plans for us. In February 1973 Jerome Hill died. The Avon Foundation, Jerome’s foundation behind the Anthology project, which had built a special, Invisible Cinema theater, designed by Peter Kubelka and had paid for the acquisition of all the prints voted into the Essential Cinema collection and the running of Anthology, was taken over by people who did not share Jerome’s vision. All funding to the Anthology project was cut off. Anthology had to move from the 425 Lafayette Street location, first to 80 Wooster Street, then to 491 Broadway, and then to its present location. The Essential Cinema Repertory project was frozen until such time as another visionary such as Jerome Hill will appear.
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/essential-cinema
And we thought that that would be the main function of
Anthology Film Archives, to just keep showing that repertory, and that's it. While at the
Cinémathèque, on Wooster Street, we would show anything. And that is more or less how
it was until '72 or '73.
At the very beginning I sort of expected, hoped, that P. Adams Sitney would run
Anthology. But he could not cope with it. He resigned very early and I got stuck with it.
And it became too much to run both the Cinémathèque and Anthology. So eventually I
gave up the Cinémathèque.
And it became again very complicated, because very soon we
had to go into film preservation. When we began looking for the best possible prints, we
discovered that nobody knew where the originals were, or they were falling to pieces. And
then Martinson died before we even opened. And then two years later Jerome Hill died.
And we had no more support. And you know it was quite expensive to run on Lafayette
Street. When Jerome Hill died, the Avon Foundation – his foundation – refused to support
us because they thought that Anthology and all that film that Jerome was so interested in
was just a big mistake, and that they had to step in and correct that mistake by cutting off
the support, phasing us out. So I decided that we had no way of surviving on Lafayette
Street, we had to move to 80 Wooster. So in '74 we moved back to 80 Wooster, because
that space was ours, and did not cost anything. It was very cheap to run, and there we
could survive. And we survived
Then in '79 it became clear
that the space was too small for us. There were various other problems. Other floors were
taken by other people. There were families. And just above us there were always children
running and throwing things. You could not show anything silent. We could not protect it
from sound coming through the ceiling, no matter what we did. Plus, we needed a library
and the film collection was expanding. That is when I decided to purchase the present
building at 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue in an auction from the city. Of course, La Mama
[an experimental theater group] wanted it. We had a very big fight. I had to mobilize a lot
of support. And we managed to get the building. Again, thanks to Jerome Hill, who was
already dead for a good five or six years. But he, in his will, left to Anthology a little piece
of land in Florida. So we sold that and we got 50,000 dollars, and with that 50,000 we
bought the building. Thanks to Jerome Hill.
https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/DaVega/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFilm_Interviews/Interview%20with%20Jonas%20Mekas.pdf
http://www.webofstories.com/play/jonas.mekas/91;jsessionid=4A96872F16CC8581E79620BF45ADB415
But fate had other plans for us. In February 1973 Jerome Hill died. The Avon Foundation, Jerome’s foundation behind the Anthology project, which had built a special, Invisible Cinema theater, designed by Peter Kubelka and had paid for the acquisition of all the prints voted into the Essential Cinema collection and the running of Anthology, was taken over by people who did not share Jerome’s vision. All funding to the Anthology project was cut off. Anthology had to move from the 425 Lafayette Street location, first to 80 Wooster Street, then to 491 Broadway, and then to its present location. The Essential Cinema Repertory project was frozen until such time as another visionary such as Jerome Hill will appear.
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/essential-cinema
And we thought that that would be the main function of
Anthology Film Archives, to just keep showing that repertory, and that's it. While at the
Cinémathèque, on Wooster Street, we would show anything. And that is more or less how
it was until '72 or '73.
At the very beginning I sort of expected, hoped, that P. Adams Sitney would run
Anthology. But he could not cope with it. He resigned very early and I got stuck with it.
And it became too much to run both the Cinémathèque and Anthology. So eventually I
gave up the Cinémathèque.
And it became again very complicated, because very soon we
had to go into film preservation. When we began looking for the best possible prints, we
discovered that nobody knew where the originals were, or they were falling to pieces. And
then Martinson died before we even opened. And then two years later Jerome Hill died.
And we had no more support. And you know it was quite expensive to run on Lafayette
Street. When Jerome Hill died, the Avon Foundation – his foundation – refused to support
us because they thought that Anthology and all that film that Jerome was so interested in
was just a big mistake, and that they had to step in and correct that mistake by cutting off
the support, phasing us out. So I decided that we had no way of surviving on Lafayette
Street, we had to move to 80 Wooster. So in '74 we moved back to 80 Wooster, because
that space was ours, and did not cost anything. It was very cheap to run, and there we
could survive. And we survived
Then in '79 it became clear
that the space was too small for us. There were various other problems. Other floors were
taken by other people. There were families. And just above us there were always children
running and throwing things. You could not show anything silent. We could not protect it
from sound coming through the ceiling, no matter what we did. Plus, we needed a library
and the film collection was expanding. That is when I decided to purchase the present
building at 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue in an auction from the city. Of course, La Mama
[an experimental theater group] wanted it. We had a very big fight. I had to mobilize a lot
of support. And we managed to get the building. Again, thanks to Jerome Hill, who was
already dead for a good five or six years. But he, in his will, left to Anthology a little piece
of land in Florida. So we sold that and we got 50,000 dollars, and with that 50,000 we
bought the building. Thanks to Jerome Hill.
https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/DaVega/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFilm_Interviews/Interview%20with%20Jonas%20Mekas.pdf
