Spring Street
In January it was Kim’s Video. In February it was New Yorker Films, an important distributor of arthouse cinema for over four decades. Its catalog of more than four hundred titles included directors like Bertolucci, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Godard, Kurosawa, Herzog, Tarkovsky, and Marker – bringing crucial foreign films to an American audience. Had I not first seen Sans Soleil passionately introduced by Werner Herzog in a cramped downtown theater, I probably would have watched it – obscurity of obscurities – on the New Yorker video release in the NYU library. According to an article in the New York Times, the company is now closing because its collection is being auctioned as collateral in a defaulted loan by the production company that acquired New Yorker in 2002. Because we are talking about distribution rights – and not physical videos, as in the case of Kim’s, on their way to a far off collection in Italy – the fallout from all of this is more complicated. But if, as Chris Marker posits, cinema is how mankind remembers, this most recent demise is a blow to more than just independent filmmaking. One of the most poignant sequences of remembering that I have seen on film came at the end of the New Yorker release, My Dinner with Andre. Wallace Shawn’s character – and isn’t it really just Wallace Shawn himself? – sits in the back of a cab on his way home from dinner with his friend and looks out the window at the various shops along the avenue and is reminded of his childhood; in the background, Erik Satie’s melancholy Gymnopédie No. 1. “I rode home through the city streets. There wasn’t a street – there wasn’t a building – that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There I was buying a suit with my father. There I was having an ice cream soda after school.” There, just above this writing, I was making a film about my city, but increasingly I wonder if it will ever be seen. At the top, a rare glimpse of Chris Marker filming in 1994 [YouTube, Kai Zimmer].
