In early August, I attended a 70mm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at the Museum of the Moving Image. Two weeks before that, I attended a similar screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Both screenings were packed.
More recently, I went to a 35mm showing of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953) at the IFC on a Tuesday night. It was fairly well attended.
These recent trips to the movies have not only revealed to me that repertory screenings are in high demand, as is typical during the summertime in New York, but that a film’s status (whether it’s a certifiable classic or not) doesn’t seem to matter all that much to filmgoers these days. What matters now is how a film is packaged, which I do not mean in a pejorative sense, but only to highlight the importance a programmer’s framing or a venue’s marketing plays when it comes to hyping up a film’s status among New York cinephiles.
At least, this helps me understand how “Bleak Week” drew in a crowd at The Paris Theater through edgelord-isms while Éric Rohmer’s rarely screened Full Moon in Paris (1984) failed to pack the house at the same venue. It seems that the present filmgoer in New York is not as interested in just watching rare films as they are in taking part of events—a preview of the feeling that will sweep the city up once the New York Film Festival kicks into full gear.
I have always had a difficult relationship with packed houses. Although it makes me happy to know a film programmer is being rewarded for their work whenever I attend a full show—a feeling that I have experienced myself every now and then at Spectacle—and that people might be uncovering a new favorite film for themselves, I cannot help but feel a bit suffocated at sold-out screenings. Inevitably, I turn inward, such that the relationship between the screen and myself becomes direct. And yet, someone’s unsolicited laugh or seat-shuffling always breaks my focus. For the most part, I don’t mind these interruptions. They keep things human and imperfect, reminding me that I am not alone, in the theater and in life.
Speaking to the writer and film critic Alexandra Coburn, I became aware that my reaction was atypical. We’d both attended the same 70mm presentations at MoMI, but her experience was much more jubilant than mine. “I think a packed house is a completely different energy—it’s so charged,” she told me. “There’s something distinct and enjoyable about this, about the vibration of bodies next to you when you’re in a movie theater. People talk about it being a communal experience and blah, blah, blah, but when you are surrounded in a movie theater you really feel like you are surrounded by a community.”
I wonder if this sense of community can be likened to the social scene at a party. Certain theaters attract certain people and certain venues disapprove of certain behavior, while others seem to encourage it. The dress code seems too cool for me at Metrograph and the peaceful silence that has defined my week-day excursions to Anthology Film Archives has always brought me comfort; I can surmise the former is attractive to some while the latter off-putting to others. To each their own, but with the feeling of FOMO encroaching on my filmgoing mentality, and the inevitable run-in with someone you know, or someone you’ve seen, being part of going to the movies as a regular filmgoer in the city, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that by buying a ticket to a screening, you’re also buying admission into a club, or possibly even a certain ideology—for better or worse. As such, the feeling that you might be organically involving yourself with a community becomes difficult to trust, which is why I wanted to highlight the work of two programmers whose keen awareness of what the New York film scene was missing, combined with their deft ability to select films and bring in audiences, has reminded me that organic community-building still exists in a repertory scene that has been leaning pretty heavily into event-ification as of late.
The screening of Glen or Glenda I mentioned earlier was co-programmed by Liz Purchell—a queer historian and film programmer who always seems to be working on a million great projects at once—as part of the monthly series “Cruising the Movies,” her ongoing collaboration with writer and historian KJ Shepherd. For most people, Ed Wood is the guy when it comes to so-bad-it’s-good films. And, anyone who has attended a screening for a film like The Room (2003) knows there is a predisposition toward obnoxiousness at such screenings. It’s not necessarily a bad thing given how absurd films like The Room are, but just something to consider in terms of audience behavior when it comes to watching beloved bad films.
As a jetlagged, first-time viewer of Glen or Glenda, I couldn’t help but feel a bit apprehensive about the screening. But Purchell and Shepherd's smart introduction warded these fears off, as they emphasized the film in terms of its irregularities while not necessarily down-playing its reputation so that they could emphasize technical and thematic dimensions in Glen or Glenda that often go unacknowledged—the spellbinding dream sequence near its halfway mark and the film’s genuine representation of gender anxiety. “I really wanted to highlight that this is not your living room,” Purchell told me. “Don’t shout at the movie or whatever.”
Purchell, who programs a lot of transgressive films, seems to have mastered the art of setting up a film in such a way that viewings are not littered with unsettling laughs or upsetting behavior. “With The New York Ripper [1982, screened two months ago as part of “Weird Wednesday” at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn] I was worried that people were going to laugh at some of the horrible things that happen in that movie,” she told me. “But people were turning up and the reactions were really good.” I surmise, in part, that this was the case because of her tendency to treat films respectfully, offering enough context beforehand so that viewers know how to interact with the films she presents, regardless of how violent, strange, or challenging they are.
Such a practice comes with a learning-curve, as well as the experience of sitting through something being mistreated. For example, Purchell told me that she generally avoids seeing David Lynch films in theaters after a terrible experience watching Wild at Heart (1990) in Austin where people were laughing at “Laura Dern talking about being raped” in addition to guffawing “whenever Nick Cage showed up on-screen.” It’s behavior that I still find too common in New York and seems to magnify at full screenings of uncontextualized, risqué films. And I’m positive that this behavior belongs to a community, while the opposite belongs to the community Purchell and company have helped grow through their own careful curatorial practice. Although I decided to rush home after Glen or Glenda ended, it made me happy to see people outside the screening discussing the intricacies behind Wood’s weird way of making movies.
Meanwhile, this last month at Anthology Film Archives has seen the filmmaker and programmer Adam Baran present a victory lap of sorts with “Best of Narrow Rooms,” a program spotlighting the biggest hits from his ongoing series of the same name, which dedicates itself to showing “stranger, darker, and more exhilarating films” than mainstream audiences are used to from programs focusing on gay cinema. “I’m a gay man and I feel like I don’t see that many gay, male-centric film screening series,” he told me. “You always see the same seven queer films anytime anyone programs a queer film series. Since the ‘90s, all you see is sappy wish-fulfillment for gay audiences.”
The first “Narrow Rooms” screening I attended was Duffer (1972), which—to quote IMDb—“tells the deranged story of a teenage boy torn between the womanly charms of a kindly prostitute, and the relentless, sadistic attentions of an older man.” The teenage boy’s thoughts regarding this situation are conveyed through an unnerving voice-over that enhances the film’s nightmarish feel, yet Duffer is surprisingly tender. It’s a delicate mess and something I would have never seen had it not been for Baran. More pertinently, I remember his introduction to the film being accompanied by an invitation to a nearby bar for a post-screening conversation and the genuineness with which he navigated the different smoking circles gathered outside Anthology after the film ended. My subsequent attendance of more “Narrow Rooms” screenings have only confirmed this genuineness to be true, as well as the real sense of community present at each screening, as evidenced in the many recurring faces I’ve stumbled upon at each showing I’ve gone to.
Nonetheless, most of these screenings were packed screenings and I did find myself occasionally distracted by those around me, as I did during 2001 and The Searchers. But it brought me comfort to know that the people at all of these screenings looked more interested in the film before their eyes than the people sitting around them, in the artistry and topics on display rather than the overarching conceptual-cum-marketing ideas underlying each program. “During the Stargate sequence [in 2001] you watched people locked into the film, not breathing,” said Coburn. I admit I was one of those people, and it was through that experience of intense, individual concentration that I found myself most connected to those around me, as though the film had tapped me into something larger than myself, something not perceptible through an immediate glance at my surroundings, but only in the act of looking so far into Kubrick’s cosmos that it became necessary to remember we were all staring at space on a screen, processing rays of light and reflecting on they made us feel.
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City
Special thanks to Adam Baran, Alexandra Coburn, and Liz Purchell.
