Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema — CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; Columnist for Berkshire Eagle; and co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 —4th Edition (Praeger).
Leonard Quart
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LEONARD QUART: Living with the plague
Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020 - For the moment, I am thinking of how the country will deal with the agony of the present.
LEONARD QUART: ‘Sorry We Missed You’ is Ken Loach’s version of the gig economy
Monday, 2 Mar 2020 - Loach is one of the few directors who makes films depicting working class characters confronting oppressive labor conditions as well as indifferent unions and callous government bureaucracies.
LEONARD QUART: A few takes on the state of America and New York City
Tuesday, 11 Feb 2020 - I know it’s self-evident, but what strikes me is how differently we treat idols of the popular culture, and famous writers who die.
LEONARD QUART: On politics and films
Tuesday, 21 Jan 2020 - I’m struck by how different the very personal and deeply felt Akerman film is from the Golden Globe-winning and Academy Award-nominated “Joker.”
Dark times are upon us
Thursday, 2 Jan 2020 - "I still live with a faint sense of possibility that public life can progress, and that the forces of liberalism and social democracy (and hopefully decency, but that’s never guaranteed) will take power."
LEONARD QUART: Musings redux
Thursday, 12 Dec 2019 - As always, I muse about the city, which, these days, I explore less extensively.
LEONARD QUART: Coming home to squalor
Saturday, 16 Nov 2019 - The original Penn Station occupied two city blocks and featured, according to the New York Preservation Project, “an ornate exterior, arcade, waiting room, concourse and carriage-ways.”
LEONARD QUART: Musing
Tuesday, 22 Oct 2019 - In fact, the wing keeps on shifting some of its paintings, which gives museumgoers a chance to see pieces of the immense collection that the Met has been warehousing for years.
BOOK REVIEWS: Two writers on growing up black
Saturday, 12 Oct 2019 - Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book . . . appeared at just the right moment, when the media was saturated with cases of police acting unprofessionally, destructively and sometimes murderously in their dealings with young black men.
LEONARD QUART: A bus ride and Trump
Saturday, 28 Sep 2019 - For Trump, lying is like breathing — it’s instinctive and devoid of shame or guilt.
LEONARD QUART: New York, a truly urban city
Saturday, 7 Sep 2019 - Much of the city’s urbanscape gains its character from the people and dramas that can provide solace, however dark one's personal mood.
On the death of an artist and friend: Jonathan Baumbach remembered
Saturday, 3 Aug 2019 - It’s not Jonathan the man I want to write about, but how he defined himself as an artist, which he saw as a moral imperative—his life’s prime and most passionate commitment.
LEONARD QUART: Going home
Sunday, 14 Jul 2019 - When I am in the city l still try to walk a great deal, closely observing the people who pass by me on the street.
LEONARD QUART: Martin Scorsese honored at Berkshire International Film Festival
Friday, 7 Jun 2019 - As he always has done, Scorsese spoke about film with passion, encyclopedic knowledge and a belief in the greatness of the medium.
LEONARD QUART: Combatting New York City’s store vacancies
Thursday, 25 Apr 2019 - The solution to the problem of store vacancies is hard to achieve. In 2017 there were 200 empty storefronts on Broadway alone.
LEONARD QUART: Looking at paintings
Friday, 15 Mar 2019 - Rackstraw Downes' paintings would best be described as realist with his sustained, meticulous and intensive outdoor working process, and paintings that draw attention to what is characteristic of the 21st-century cityscape.
LEONARD QUART: Looking at Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2019
Saturday, 23 Feb 2019 - There is nothing unique or wrong in de Blasio’s mix of an affirmation of progressive principles and acting as a practical politician.
Leonard Quart: Three New York memories
Saturday, 19 Jan 2019 - I wanted to leave my parochial Bronx and take greater risks, care less about a secure future, and act out some of the wilder dreams I harbored.
New York Sketches: A walk in NoHo
Sunday, 9 Dec 2018 - Predictably, once the artists settled on these streets, this small neighborhood with cobbled streets slowly gentrified.
LEONARD QUART: A momentous election
Thursday, 8 Nov 2018 - One result of the election is that the country is even more divided between rural and suburban, big-city America—not so different than Europe where right wing parties have their support in small towns and rural areas outside cities like Warsaw, Berlin and Budapest.
LEONARD QUART: Hobbling about and Kavanaugh
Saturday, 6 Oct 2018 - What is troubling is not Trump’s predictably crass and sadistic behavior, but the support Kavanaugh has aroused from a sizable portion of the public.
LEONARD QUART: Pain and politics
Saturday, 15 Sep 2018 - Of course, there is the political world, which somehow I continue to obsess about -- aching and all.
LEONARD QUART: Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKKKlansman’ shows political passion
Tuesday, 21 Aug 2018 - Spike Lee's new film "BlacKKKlansman" contains some flaws but, though set in the 1970s, often transcends its weaknesses to heavy-handedly but powerfully evoke our current Trump-dominated era, one in which an unembarrassed racist is in power and the alt-right, including neo-Nazis, has been resurrected.
LEONARD QUART: Resurrecting boyhood memories
Saturday, 11 Aug 2018 - When I feel the need, I often invoke images of my prosaic East Bronx neighborhood, which was then an intact, primarily Jewish working-class and lower-class/middle-class mix of a few Art Deco apartment buildings, a few private homes, and many five-story red brick walk-ups and gray tenements.
LEONARD QUART: Midsummer New York
Tuesday, 24 Jul 2018 - My encounter is the kind that you could easily have in the city if you ask the right questions, and have the patience to sit and listen closely to another person’s revelations.
LEONARD QUART: Tactless Trump in London
Friday, 13 Jul 2018 - His aggressive intrusion into British politics only heightened the anger of a large portion of the British public.
LEONARD QUART: Bryant Park, an urban oasis
Saturday, 7 Jul 2018 - I often stopped there for a latte from one of its kiosks, or just sat there either reading the Times or observing people before class.
QUART: Journey into the past
Sunday, 27 May 2018 - My wife is a painter enamored with color, so we visited a number of London’s art museums.
LEONARD QUART: A day in Central Park
Wednesday, 25 Apr 2018 - I like the way the city and Central Park interact — the feeling that one can find both seclusion and peace as well as communal excitement.
LEONARD QUART: Marching with the young
Sunday, 25 Mar 2018 - My political anger towards those who hold power remains intact. But today on an NYC March I began to feel something has changed.
LEONARD QUART: Oscar Night 2018
Tuesday, 6 Mar 2018 - “I think that the greatest thing that our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper." -- Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro
CITY SKETCHES: A walk on Orchard Street
Sunday, 18 Feb 2018 - I still can remember an Orchard Street of the ‘40s and ‘50s where my mother took me, a resentful 12 year old, shopping.