This led to that …
In researching through Google and Wikipedia, with their numerous references, I pieced together this picture of how the New York Film Festival came together – how this led to that:
The New York Film Festival is one of the most important cultural events in New York City now, developing from modest beginnings in 1963 to a global red carpet event today. Pioneer initiatives in France and America preceded it.
Initiative 1. In 1930s France, a young Henri Langlois collected reels of silent film – the beginning of a lifelong passion to save film from destruction. In 1938, he co-founded the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry. By the mid-1950s, after the German occupation of France had ended with the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Langlois began showing films from his collection to the public. They especially resonated with a younger generation of film buffs who had not been able to see American films, or films from any anti-Nazi country, because of German censorship.
Initiative 2. Some avid attendees of the Cinémathèque Française began writing for a French film journal, the Cahiers du Cinéma, co-founded in 1951 by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and edited, after 1957, by Éric Rohmer. They included Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. In 1954, Truffaut penned a now-famous article: “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in which he took issue with traditional French films (excepting those by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo) as unexciting, and as often uninspired cinematic adaptations of novels. The films they had seen at the Cinémathèque, where they discovered films by Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, John Ford, and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood, and their distaste for most French film, led to a movement by these young writers (joined by Rohmer) to make their own films.
Initiative 3. The French New Wave was launched in the mid-to-late 1950s by Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Chabrol, together with Left Bank Group filmmakers of a similar though more politicized persuasion – Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais. It featured non-professional actors and on-location shooting (to save money), ambiguity and inconclusiveness of narrative in preference to the straight narrative of traditional French cinema, and, in many instances, a departure from traditional camera work, with frequent emphasis on tracking shots, long takes, and jump cuts.
Initiative 4. Amos Vogel, an émigré from Vienna to America with his parents in 1939, carried on his life-long love of cinema by founding a club for film-viewing with a paid membership in 1947, since films shown on that basis rather than publicly were free from interference by New York State censors. He started this club, Cinema 16, after seeing the demand for non-Hollywood cinema from attending a program of independent film organized by Maya Deren at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The enthusiasm was so great that the program was extended for 16 nights, with 2 shows each night, in addition to the initial evening. This, though, was a one-off event. Cinema 16 was ongoing, and was responsible for introducing films by Rivette and Resnais to American audiences, for showing other international but not French filmmakers, such as Roman Polanski and Nagisa Oshima, and for presenting American independent and often avant-garde cinema to them, in films by Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, and others. Cinema 16 ended in 1963, when Vogel co-founded the New York Film Festival.
Initiative 5. Richard Roud, an American representative for Cahiers du Cinéma in London and founder of the London Film Festival, later brought to America films he wanted to give Americans an opportunity to see. He co-founded the New York Film Festival in 1963 with Amos Vogel, and gave the French New Wave a major platform for their work. Vogel was program director of the NY Film Festival until 1968. Roud continued as director of the selection committee until October, 1987. Although Roud was a Francophile, and brought 131 French films to the festival during his tenure, he also brought 125 American films, 49 Italian films, 47 German films, 25 UK films, 24 Hungarian films, 23 Polish films, and 19 Japanese films, in addition to lesser numbers from 28 other countries. (my figures) The global reach of the festival has intensified since Roud left, but the seeds for it were planted while he was there. Through Langlois, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Varda, Roud, Deren, Vogel, and others, This led to That – the New York Film Festival we know today.
Use databases and print references in our library to get further information on this history – databases for film studies, such as Communication Source, the MLA [Modern Language Association] Bibliography, and Screen Studies Collection; film viewing databases, such as Silent Film Online; and print books on these initiatives, such as Henri Langlois, First Citizen of Cinema (PN1998 .L38 L3613 1994 Offsite); A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinemathèque française (PN1998 .A3 L3549 1983 Offsite); Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, by Scott MacDonald (online in JStor Books); and studies of the films of New Wave, Left Bank Group, and American avant-garde and independent filmmakers.
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