Amos and Marcia Vogel

Amos Vogel arrived in American as a Jewish refugee from Vienna in the 1930s. As a young man he attended screenings by the film society in Vienna. He was also active in socialist-zionist politics; even after coming to the US he tried for many years to get to Palestine and build the kibbutz and communal lifestyle he dreamed of in his youth. Later, he and his wife Marcia attended film meetings at MoMA and were awed by the work of artists such as Maya Deren.  

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian filmmaker whose groundbreaking work propelled the American avant-garde film world. He fled Europe with his brother due to the war and spent time in a labor camp before arriving in New York. As a young man in the city he claims to have attended every cinema 16 program and considers it a critical source of his film education.
In the early 1960s Mekas and others founded the Filmmakers Cooperative as an alternative film distributor; it is still in operation today. A few years later they formed the New American Cinema Group, which is now used as a term to describe this particular period of avant-garde film. The group had been holding informal screenings around town and called themselves The Filmmakers Cinemateque. Mekas joined George Maciunas (also Lithuanian) and his Fluxus movement. Maciunas and Mekas alike, were accustomed to communal operations such as farmers cooperatives that were prevalent in Eastern European. Out of this spirit Maciunas created the idea of artists cooperatives so that artists could buy property collectively and worry less about rising rents.  The Filmmakers Cinemateque purchased the ground floor and basement of Maciunas’ first Fluxhouse at 80 Wooster St. This is essentially the origin of the SoHo art scene.

Symon Gould

Symon Gould founded the Film Guild in New York City in 1923 and was "perhaps the first to show non-box office film in this country… in Broadway theaters, at the Cameo Theater, and subsequently at the theater which I built and helped design, known as the Film Guild Playhouse, which is now called the 8th Street Playhouse."
MacDonald, S. (1997). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Wide Angle, 19(1), 3-48.