Reading The Edge recently, I was disturbed by an article informing me that the sale of the Great Barrington Triplex that seemed a fait accompli may be stalled. The company that was supposed to purchase the theater seems to be having trouble raising the necessary investment money. If it fails to raise the needed cash, the theater will be shut down. This would be a grievous loss for the town’s cultural and social life. The Triplex may never have turned into my dream of an art cinema that would screen primarily a mix of classic repertory films and new American Indies and foreign art works, but it did show A-list Hollywood movies and once in a while an Indie and art film would be thrown in (for which I was always grateful). I always felt at home entering the simply built, unadorned theater, and I saw it as a refuge. It was the only way I could satisfy my craving for the full experience of watching cinematic narratives and images while up in the Berkshires during the summer.
I remember going to the Triplex one afternoon in the summer of 2021, with the pandemic’s virulence diminishing but far from over, and being inside a theater for the first time after more than a year and a half. I was watching a first run commercial film, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” which held special meaning and pleasure for this New Yorker who intimately knew Washington Heights because my parents had lived there in the latter part of their life. There were about 20 other people consciously scattered about the theater, and my joy watching the film’s choreography and slightly romanticized evocation of that immigrant, working-class neighborhood on a large screen in the Triplex’s darkness made me forget the film’s flaws.
As somebody who taught film at The City University of New York for almost four decades; collaborated on books on the subject; is still an editor on a major film magazine, Cineaste; and continues to write film criticism into my 80s, movie theaters have always had an extraordinary significance for me. In pre-pandemic New York City, I used to attend six to eight films a month. Today, I go to at most about a film a month and watch much too many films and TV series on computer and television—many of them (e.g., “Midsomer Murders,” “Vera and Riverdale”) mediocre works that at best merely serve to pass the time. But my favorite Manhattan theaters still survive. There’s the IFC; the Angelica Film Center; and the one that has had the profoundest role in my film-going history since the 80s, my temple, The Film Forum on West Houston Street.
The Forum began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector, and a $19,000 annual budget, open only on weekends. Its present director, Karen Cooper, took the leadership position in 1972 and still holds it today; and other gifted people, like Director of Repertory Programming Bruce Goldstein and Artistic Director Mike Maggiore, have helped run things and select programs for more than 30 years. Karen Cooper guided the theater over the years in different venues into its present four-screen cinema home on West Houston Street. The theater has 280,00 annual admissions, nearly 500 seats, 50 employees, an operating budget of $5 million, and a 6 million dollar endowment. It’s the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in the city—and one of the few in the country. The staff raises approximately 45 percent of their operating income, and approximately 79 percent of the theater’s budget is spent on programming.
Public funders include The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, and various NYC agencies including the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Private donors include individuals, foundations, and corporate entities. Additionally, the members contribute more than $500,000 annually.
A few days ago, I spoke about how The Forum is doing with the deputy director Sonya Chung, who will this summer be taking over for the theater’s founder and director of 50 years, Karen Cooper. Chung has been working at The Forum since 2020 (though she’s had a 20-year relationship with the theater) when she was appointed Deputy Director to broaden the Forum’s outreach to younger and more diverse audiences.
I asked Chung if audiences have returned since COVID’s severity has lessened. She informed me that the numbers have begun to slightly increase, but the audiences are somewhat younger, and habits of film consumption have changed. It’s all “very fluid and unpredictable.” Audiences increase and decrease dependent on what film is being shown. There are repertory series like the ones centering on Japanese star Toshiro Mifune and on the director Ozu that have been popular. Audiences also embrace Iranian cinema and the classic films directed by Renoir, Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman. The theater attracts large audiences when directors appear to discuss their films for two or three nights, It has also done brilliantly reviving Nathaniel Kahn’s 2003 film about his father, “My Architect,” and continues to revive Bertolucci’s great “The Conformist.”
Sonya made it clear to me that The Forum may schedule a number of films that deal with social and political reality, but it chooses films primarily on aesthetic grounds, not ideological ones. It’s the artistic quality of a film that takes preeminence in their choice of what to show.
Chung will clearly not veer from The Forum’s half a century stated commitment to screening films that “Break the rules; tell stories in a new way; deal with controversial or provocative subject matter; and give emerging filmmakers the opportunity to reach the general public for the first time.”
May The Forum thrive for another 50 years, and the Triplex survive its economic troubles—both as havens for those who find that cinema can deepen our understanding of the world and of ourselves.
