If my last report was characterized by a sense of disillusionment, this month’s one hinges on over-enthusiasm. Within the last week, I have not only seen a couple of good films, but some rather extraordinary ones as part of Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art. And Steven Soderbergh, whose evil new film Presence (2025) was released earlier this month, has already offered audiences a remarkable cinematic object to mull over throughout the course of the year. But, all of this is besides the point. This column takes stock of the repertory scene, as new releases are not my primary concern. On the former front, it appears risky programming is paying off (as in the string of sold-out António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro screenings at Metrograph) and beloved filmmakers and actors are getting their due (Frederick Wiseman at Film at Lincoln Center and Willem Dafoe at Anthology Film Archives, respectively). As always in New York, we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to the movies. It’s a beautiful thing, but of growing concern to me.
When I’m not at the cinema, I am still watching movies. This watching occurs on computer screens—most of it for work, some of it for projects I’ve convinced myself count as work, and some small portion of it for pleasure. The pervasiveness of film-viewing among cinephiles is nothing special; I imagine it is a universal condition. What concerns me, in the age of Letterboxd and torrents, is that a lot of this viewing is unstructured, digressive, and impulsive. For lack of a better word: random. My stance is not against chance, which I consider paramount in every aspect of life, but against whims. Local cinephilia increasingly appears to trade in bursts of interest; hence, the sudden veneration, and fleeting enthusiasm, for different filmmakers of the month. Right now, it’s Wiseman, soon it will be Manoel de Oliveira, about two weeks ago it was Charles Burnett. These are all great filmmakers whose sudden manifestation in the NYC-limelight are more than well-deserved; the shame lies in whether audiences and critics will continue to talk about, or write about, them beyond these privileged moments of attention. The more new interviews I see pop up, in addition to the numerous pitches I receive, related to the presentation of a legacy filmmaker’s rare works, the more I feel as though directors are being trivialized. Because every piece of writing, and every bit of cultural commentary, requires a peg, everyone ends up adapting to publicists’ timelines and time-restrictions; hence, a dialogue between critic and filmmaker becomes a Q&A despite being published under the title “interview,” a writer’s reflections on film are packaged as publicity under the header “review,” and a filmmaker’s legacy is transformed into a fad under the premises of “appreciation.”
Now, let’s return to the theater. It is clear that there is an abundance of great films to watch across New York, as there is a glut of films to supplement those viewings with—both of these facts are concurrent with a moment of shortening attention spans, which is to say: short-lived and diminishing passions. These flurries are shared among audiences and curators, with a lot of programming around town reflecting a proclivity for loose thematic associations or simple accumulation, rather than rigorous research and comprehensive retrospectives. (A lack of money in cultural programming is certainly to blame for this, as are deadlines and questions of staffing.) Nevertheless, a plethora of wonderful films to watch keep showing up around town while the reason behind their presentation remains far-fetched or mysterious. For example, I was able to catch a 35mm print of Raúl Ruiz’s Love Torn in a Dream (2000, pictured at top) at Metrograph two days ago. It made for a wonderful evening, but its connection to the overarching “Raise Ravens and They Will Pick Your Eyes Out” series was lost on me. Though I am ever-grateful to live in a city where I can catch a Ruiz film on weeknight, it troubles me that the context behind its presentation remains so ambiguous. Individual taste, and all its shady idiosyncrasies, seems to be the programming directive in town; collective history, and the thorny relationships that define it, seem tedious when anyone can order history according to their own set of references.
What we are experiencing is a great liberation. It’s both over-stimulating and paralyzing, of tremendous benefits and certain setbacks. By this, I mean that the degree of access and ability to choose what to watch at home via streamings services or other means, as well as the incredible selection of films to pick from for a theatrical outing on any given night in New York, is so great that viewers are either seduced into patterns of compulsive viewing—and here, the context behind what they watch is not as important as the content’s ability to grip them on an emotional or artistic level—or they lose the will to watch, overwhelmed with all the images that face them. This freedom belies its harms. At the same time, it means the canon can be overturned, and that cinema can grow in new directions. That is how we get a weekend in which my tour of New York’s repertory cinemas takes me from Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), to António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Rosa de Areia (1989), to Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President (2024). This viewing triptych consists of an American film, a Portuguese film, and an Austrian film about the United States; a classic, a soon-to-be classic, and an exciting contemporary film; a fiction, a docufiction, and an essay. Perhaps I am short-sighted, but it is my belief that the combination of kinds of films available to New York audiences right now is at an all-time high—and bound to increase. This should be inspiring, though it often feels distressing.
At a moment when there is so much to watch, and no real rhyme or reason to navigate how to do so, it is my belief that audiences should embrace omnivorousness. Yet, as we move away from standard retrospectives and into the land of thematized lists and series, the instinct to parse out historical contexts and aesthetic connections must persist among cinephiles. Otherwise, we’ll trade a structural understanding of film history for soup—and rather than let film history be transformed into a new set of constellations exclusively put forth by curators, or into an imprecise set of films people like championed by one anonymous cinephile here and another there, or into indistinguishable data points on websites like IMDB and Letterboxd, now is the time to develop a new, rhizomatic understanding of film history based on the collective recognition of visual rhymes and political correspondences. To avoid gluttony—its lures and numbings—this process must be parsed out over time. Thus, the contemporary cinephile must be an omnivore, but avoid becoming a glutton.
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City.
