Artistic Ideals Drive Anthology's Archives

No, it's not the set of Cinema Paradiso or Goodbye, Dragon Inn-though it very well could be. When you step into the Anthology Film Archives on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street, you can practically sense the aura of old-world cinematheques emanating from its crumbling paint and antique projectors. Although one would never guess from its innocuous façade, Anthology Film Archives is New York's premier institution dedicated to cultivating the public's taste in independent, experimental, and innovative films.
Perhaps it is only appropriate that America's foremost arbiter of contemporary avant-garde cinema is housed in a former courthouse. In 1979, Anthology Film Archives acquired the Second Avenue Courthouse building and spent more than a million dollars renovating it. Today, the building houses two theaters, a research library, a film preservation department, and an art gallery. All these facilities help further the AFA's mission of preserving and promulgating oft-overlooked yet important works of experimental cinema.
The Anthology Film Archives' existence as a cultural institution dates from 1969 when a group of radical visionaries in the American film world decided to break with what they saw as the increasing commercialization and erosion of art in contemporary cinema. The most prolific of Anthology's founding fathers is Jonas Mekas, who in 1954 began the magazine Film Culture (America's version of the groundbreaking Cahiers du Cinema) as well as the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, forerunner of the present-day Anthology Film Archives. In 1958 he began writing a film column for the Village Voice commenting on and contributing to the burgeoning underground film movement in New York. When given the opportunity by filmmaker Jerome Hill to move into an empty lot adjacent to the Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street in 1968, Mekas jumped at the chance to build a theater that would truly reflect the tastes of the cinematic connoisseurs.
Upon its opening on December 1, 1970, Anthology issued a polemical Manifesto that declared its mission: "Anthology Film Archives is the first film museum exclusively devoted to the film as an art." Not only did Mekas and his like-minded cohorts outline a formal denouncement of "their Hollywoods and their stars," they sought to redefine the meaning of a great film.
Thus it was that the bigwigs of the late Sixties American indie film movement (Mekas, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, P. Adams Sitney and Ken Kelman) decided to create an alternative canon of "pure" film. The selections were judged on the abstract bases of "wholeness and unity," but judged above all was the centrality of the film's "aesthetic endeavor." The resulting list begins with the Lumière brothers and includes notables such as D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, and Jean Renoir. But lest you think this list sounds like your typical laundry-list syllabus for an Intro to Film Studies class, the group also declared more obscure work canonical, such as Dimitri Kirsanoff's Rapt and Ernie Gehr's Still.
In every case, the selection committee held fast to the criteria that "the art of cinema surfaces primarily when it divests itself of commercial norms." Given their bohemian-utopian ideology, it is no wonder that AFA seems utterly uninterested in making money from its screenings. Anthology is dedicated to screening its "Essential Cinema" collection on a rotational basis, completely free for AFA members. The audience members are, by and large, true connoisseurs of alternative and international cinema, or film students looking to be well-versed in aesthetic and radical work.
"Our most loyal audiences are well-versed in all kinds of cinema-documentaries, short films...Anthology represents that kind of spectrum and is unique in that sense," says Bradley Eros, Anthology's Theater Manager and Researcher. "I suppose MoMA is the only comparable institution in New York; but still, very few places will screen experimental films and works-in-progress. [This is because] Anthology has such an experimental background and is dedicated to cultivating new filmmakers."
Many scholars and students come not only to view or screen their works-in-progress; they also come to do research at AFA's reference library. "Many see this place as a laboratory that offers an education in film," says Eros. "When Jonas [Mekas] had his Cinematheque in the Sixties, Andy Warhol would come to learn, and see shows Jonas had put together."
Apart from providing a forum for budding filmmakers, AFA frequently houses retrospectives of directors on the cutting edge of global, artistic cinema such as Claire Denis of France and Moira Tierney of Ireland, to name just a few. Many niche foreign films that gain recognition from film festivals hold their US premieres at AFA. Some notably high-profile recent premieres include Hou Hsiao-hsien's 2004 film Cafe Lumiere, which was screened earlier this year at the New York Film Festival.
In the past six summers, Anthology has run the immensely popular "A Tribute to Kino International" series, showing canonical classics such as The Bicycle Thief, M, 8 1⁄2, as well as more recent films such as Zvyagintsev's The Return and Haneke's The Piano Teacher. Also remarkable is the esoteric array of film festivals that the AFA houses: the Subway Cinema Asian Film Festival, the African Diaspora Film Festival, the Brazilian Film Festival-and the list goes on.
In a sadly ironic twist of fate, the exterior of Anthology was used in the decidedly commercial blockbuster Spiderman 2 as the outside of Dr. Octavius' lab. But regardless of what goes on outside the Courthouse's walls, we will be assured that within, Anthology will continue its mission to serve cineastes' obscure but not-quite-obsolete tastes.